Booting W510

Can now get the W510 to boot from almost anything, anything that is UEFI compliant and has the right signature.

Evidently disabling "Secure Boot" under BOOT in the BIOS has no effect and you cannot turn it off under SECURITY because there are no selections. With "Secure Boot" disabled MSINFO32 still shows the BIOS Mode as "UEFI". We need to be able to change this to "Legacy" per the standard.

I really would like to know when ACER plans a firmware change to allow it to boot from an XP disk for example. As part of my tasking I need to be able to boot from a special image and today this cannot be done.

Picture is of the different kinds of compliant devices I could create using Windows 8. The one marked "EMMC" is a microSD card in the socket. However when I try to boot from a latest Ubuntu "live" USB or a Windows 7 DVD that are recognised by my Aspire Netboot, the selection is not there.

W510 boot devices

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padgett

Sent the same info and picture to Acer TS. Got a scripted reply telling me how to change the BIOS Setup. This is getting tiresome. Just sent the following pictures to Acer. Everything I can turn off (have tried FTPM both ways) has been. Have no way to change others. I cannot see how this is not a simple case of faulty firmware.

From MSINFO32: BIOS Acer v1.0C 8/10/2012 and BIOS Mode: UEFI.

Secure Boot is disabled

Note that there are no "Secure Boot" settings in Security I can change.

Desipe being disbaled, it refuses to display a Windows 7 install disk as a boot option whie my Aspire netbook has no problem booting from same.

Acer please either tell me what I am missing or please fix.

herve93

HI,

MI have same issue. I need use key that don't build with windows 8 ...

herve93

Hello,

I think I find soluce : create à USB key formating on fat 32. Not on ntfs.

Put ni on USB port, relaunch tablet and press f12 you USB key Will bé présent and You can boot with

padgett

Well, that is half of the answer, you cannot use the Microsoft USB DVD download tool to create the flash drive from an ISO because it formats the drive with NTFS (my Aspire netbooks do not care but the W510 does). I used the PenDriveLinux installer and told it not to format the drive to keep it FAT32. The result would boot the Acer Systsem DVD image from a flash drive at least as far as making the language selection (did cheat and use a mouse).

However even with Secure Boot disabled, it so far refuses to recognize anything except Windows 8 (have tried with several other Fat32 boot images both flash using the same creation tool and DVDs). To be able to boot anything else (and for Acer to comply with the (U)EFI standard) we need to be able to change from "UEFI" to "Legacy".

You can use MSINFO32 (built into Windows 8) to check. Just open the search>apps and enter MSINFO32, an app marked "System Information" will show up. My tower running Windows 8 shows the BIOS mode as "Legacy". The W510 shows "UEFI" and as long as that is set it will not boot an unsigned image.

So far Acer has been silent on this issue. If they remain so tomorrow I will present a possible answer for "why" you cannot select "Legacy".

iheartlinux

Thank you so much for your posts. I was just about to run out and buy a W510. I have not been in the market for a PC for many years and even though I heard about "optimized for Windows 8", I didn't know anything about the "Secure Boot" or Clovertrail incompatibilities.

Please keep us updated. It is crucial to me that I have the ability to install Win7 or Linux.

padgett

Well there is a simple way to find out at least in a brick and mortar store, just have a tecchie demo that the BIOS Mode can be changed to "Legacy". When the Surface 8 Pro comes out I plan to find out since there is a M$ store not far away (one of the advantages of living in a resort).

Meanwhile there is another way: you can figure that any tablet designed for Windows 7 will either not have UEFI or it can be turned off, it seems that the Clover Trail devices are the ones with issues particularly since they cannot run 64 bit OSs.

There is also the matter that for UEFI to work, not only does the OS have to be signed, it must also be in the BIOS library so the only sure way is to go to Legacy. Of course then the Acer Recovery Disk won't work.

ndtanner

With all the info you and others have posted I finally for the first time today was able to boot to my WDS image server and install my base image over a USB nic onto the Acer W510. I used a powered USB hub (belkin), USB flash drive (lexar), USB keyboard and mouse (lenovo), and a USB network adapter (startech).

The usb flashdrive has to be formatted fat32 - mine is a 32gig so the size requirements I've read suggested aren't an issue.

I dumped the drivers for the tablet and my usb nic into Deployment Workbench so all would be recognized beforehand.

Then I followed these instructions (quoted here): http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/fil-PH/mdt/thread/f95f9f34-349a-4db2-8b80-f52c0bd39455

"Not sure how you formatted the USB so I'll throw this out anyway. How I format them is with diskpart.

sel disk 1 (or whatever disk it is)

clean

create part pri

sel part 1

format quick fs=fat32 label="USBWhatever"

active

assign

Then I use 7zip to extract the Liteouch.iso and copy all of the contents to the USB drive. I just did this with a new Lenovo Yoga. However, this is with a Core i5 and x64 Windows 8. Should be the same process though."

So it's just like it says, open the litetouch.iso from your deployment share\boot folder in 7zip then extract the contents directly to the empty flashdrive.

In the bios (you can get in by jamming on f2 on the usb keyboard at boot) you have to enable the F12 boot menu option.

I know I had set a supervisor password and that allowed me to disable secure boot, but I'm not sure if it's required for this to work but probably is.

The W510 also can only run Win8 x86 due to the Atom processor for sleep states support so don't bother with Win8x64 or any other OS really.

Hopefully I haven't left anything out and this helps someone!

vitya1599

Sorry for bad English, I from Russia Smiley Happy .

Hello, Acer W511 was presented to me. I don't like Windows 8 because it have a lot of malware. I want install Linux. UEFI boot have only Ubuntu 64-bit. It's device can work only 32-bit. I can't start notebook from USB. Acer support answer me "Legacy BIOS blocked and you can't use it". I don't know, why I can't install to my device OS, which I want. Help me, who was install Linux to it device.