I have an Aspire 5742-6798 that came with Windows 7 installed. Somebody tried to upgrade to Windows 8.
Now, the laptop doesn't even try to boot from the hard drive. It goes directly to the network boot.
I booted from Windows 8.1 installation media and clicked "Repair Computer". I tried a reset, which failed almost immediately. Refresh did the same. I went with Advance Options and went to a Command Prompt. bcdedit gives:
"The boot configuration data store could not be opened.
The requested system device cannot be found."
diskpart shows all partitions and volumes normal and healthy. list volume shows:
Volume 1 C Acer NTFS Partition 579 GB Healthy
Volume 2 RECOVERY NTFS Partition 600 MB Healthy Hidden
Volume 3 ESP FAT32 Partition 300 MB Healthy Hidden
Volume 4 Push Button NTFS Partition 15 GB Healthy Hidden
So, I would like to boot from the recovery partition so I can restore the laptop to out-of-box factory defaults. I'm assuming one of these partitions would do what I want. Alt-Car-F10 doesn't do anything on boot. Hard drive is configured GPT.
How can I select a partition to boot from? I know I did it once, years ago; but, I have no idea how I did that. Does the fact that the laptop is using UEFI change everything?
Thanks in advance.
cj
