W510: Bad recovery disks ?

OK, Saturday I have time to investigate further and am now pretty sure there is something wrong with either the BIOS firmware or the three included recovery CDs.

Now have two powered hubs and two external DVDs (could get to the warehouse and Microsoft store is reasonably close as long as go before noon - one of the tings about Orlando this time of year). Also has 32 and 64 bit Microsoft 8 Pro disks.

Have enabled F12 and disabled "Secure Boot" in the firmware. There are two settings for erase secure boot and restore but they have no selections, are simply mentioned.

All combinations with the DVDs and hubs have the same result: With the real Microsoft disks, the CD appears as a boot selection. With any of the three "Recovery" CD/DVDs it is ignored.

This makes me think there is something basically wrong with the recovery CDs Since all appear to read properly after Windows boots and when I created an ISO, the Microsoft recovery tool reported "is not a valid ISO file". I contacted the ISO software people and they said they could see nothing wrong with the file it had generated properly.

So one or the other, the firmware needs another update (I have the 13 December) or the supplied CD/DVDs are faulty.

Has anyone been able to boot from any of the three CD/DVDs particularly the "one of one" ?

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padgett

I have now tried a third way.

ref http://acer.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/26281/

I have done this:
" Press the Windows (Image: icon_Windows8_key.png) key + C, or swipe in from the right edge of the screen to open your Charms.
    Click Search, then type Recover.
    Click Acer Recovery Management.
    Select Restore Factory Settings.
    Click Next.
    Select Fully clean the drive.
    Click Reset."

After clicking Reset a window is displayed saying it is missing files and to "insert media". None of the three CDs included and marked "recovery" satisfy this.

Anyone have an idea where to go from here or what "missing files" it is referring to ?

tshpub

I can confirm that none of the discs work. I even converted them to bootable USB. None of them would boot even with Secure Boot off. I had to restore the system using a generic Windows USB disk instead.

Can someone from Acer tell us what we'd be missing by doing this?

Thanks

padgett

Since then I have been able to get the disk marked "System DVD" in the seperate pack to boot but after 15 minutes all disk activity had stopped and the ACER splash screen was still up.

Suspect I could just load 8 Pro but for proper evaluation I need to put it back to the factory default configuration. BTW if I attempt to generate a restore DVD, it gives an "error xxxxxx57".

I have now spent more time trying to configure this one device than on any personal computing device before and that goes back to PC-DOS 1.0.

ps even with "secure boot" off it won't recognise a Win XP SP3 install disk. Haven't tried a Vista or Win 7 install.

tshpub

I did try with a Win 7 install. It doesn't recognize it.

(My guess is that it wouldn't work anyway. For one thing the WiFi drivers seem to be Windows 8 specific)

padgett

More information:

1) It seems that disabling "Secure Boot" in the BIOS setup does nothing

2) Booting from a CD or DVD only worked with a real Windows 8 Pro disk and the System DVD disk

3) The real Win8 pro disk went like this

F12 boot gave choice of DVD or the "HDD"

After a few seconds the screen displayed "Press any key to boot from CD/DVD"

Pressing a key resulted in disk spinning for a while with ACER splash and then Win 8 setup menu appears.

4) Acer "System DVD" acted differently:

F12 boot gave choice of DVD or the "HDD"

disk spun for a while and ACER splash screen displayed

after a while the disk stopped spinning and ACER splash screen reamained...forever.

My strong suspician is that the BIOS firmware needs an update to be able to turn off "Secure boot" and that there is something wrong with the System DVD disk.