Windows Tablets

[luminous]

Hi, I have a 32GB Iconia W3-810.  The original recovery disk has been lost.

I have made a Bootable Win 8.1 DVD and also a bootable Win 8.1 USB drive.  Both of these have been tested on another laptop, and both can boot that laptop to the setup environment.

I have also followed the guide to enter the BIOS settings of the Acer tablet and alter the boot order, and change remove the secure boot option.  

Unfortunately the device just keeps attempted to boot into Windows 8.1 - the one that is full of viruses and needs to be flattened and start again.

Please help....

[billsey]

One of the first possibilities I can think of is the tablet doesn't provide enough power on the USB port to run an external DVD drive. If the drive doesn't spin up, or spins up with an irregular speed, the system won't boot from it. Connect the drive to a powered USB hub and try it that way. If you're already on a powered USB hub let us know and we'll look into other options.

[luminous]

Thanks for the tip. I should have mentioned that the drive was directly powered by the tablet and appeared to spin normally.

However, for testing I used a cable that has a Y-splitter in.  One connection was data and power, the other just power.  The data and power was connected to the tablet, the extra power cable connected to another machine.  The DVD drive was nice and stable in spin up throughout, just as it was before.

I have never seen the boot up menu allow me a choice other than the Windows Boot manager, not matter what we have connected, be that USB pen drive, USB DVD, USB HDD.  

Getting quite stuck with this one....

[billsey · Accepted solution]

A lot of those cables provide power to the tablet through the splitter, but don't provide power to the data side of the cable from the power side (I don't think I'm explaining that well). They're designed for powering your device from the powered side while allowing data access to the other side. If connected:

Tablet -----+----- Power
            |
            |
           DVD

 The Tablet receives voltage from Power and Tablet provides voltage and sends and receives data from DVD, but Power doesn't give voltage to DVD. This means that the DVD is not neccessarily getting the power budget it needs.

If you can, try it with the DVD connected to a powered hub. Spinning up and actually working are two different things, and the tablets provide much less than the maximum allowed power on their USB ports.

[luminous]

Thanks for your suggestion, I will see what I can do about getting the DVD powered up, however:-

a)  I have my cable connected in such a way that it is the DVD that is getting the extra power

b)  A USB pen drive that was made bootable is not being found either, and that too works in a laptop

It seem no matter what I do the tablet just wont see other boot devices.  I will play about with a few other configs and post back.  I do know that the USB stick that I tried is USB 3, and that occasionally can cause problems for devices to boot from them.

I've also tried a couple of different hubs, as the tablet would only see my usb keyboard through some hubs and not others.  It seems to be a rather sensitive device.

Lastly I was going to see what BIOS it was running and see if upgrading this helps

[luminous]

We are up and running.  

Turns out that we were being plonkers and had not understood the significance of UEFI bootable devices.  The image we had on the stick was a normal MBR based setup, and therefore the tablet was not seeing the device.

As soon as we obtained a 32bit version of 8.1 and made the USB stick UEFI Bootable all was fine.  

Thanks all for your help

[billsey]

Great! Nice to know it was a bit of PEBKAC instead of a design issue. UEFI is still new enough that it can be confusing.