need help with SW5-012 - interesting problem

gdrag0n

Hello all.

A friend of mine asked me to work on their families Acer Aspire Switch 10.

She also gave me a USB recovery thumb drive she purchased from Acer after their technical support charged her to diagnose the issue because the computer would not boot. She thought they could fix themselves, so she bought the thumb drive.
They could not get the USB eRecovery thumb drive to boot, so they called me. I went into the UEFI bios and set the boot sequence to boot from the USB HDD. The Memorex Mentor Media eRecovery thumb drive she purchased from Acer booted fine.

After clicking on "OK" we see a blue screen for about 5-7 minutes. Then we see:

Then we see this:

Then we see this:

And that's it. I work on a lot of computers so I made a bootable thumb drive formatted GPI+EFI, FAT32 to work with the Aspire's UEFI bios. The USB thumb drive has an Windows 8.1 ISO on it. I used my bootable thumb drive and booted back into the Aspire. Then using recovery console went in and looked at the disk properties of the flash drive (hard drive) of this tablet. Heres what I found.

Note: Disk 0 has 4 partitions. The problem looks to be the formatting of the drive. Volume 0 the C drive is shown as RAW. Both the hidden drives show to be RAW. The thumb drive sold to these folks by Acer to reset this unit to factory settings, can't or won't create or properly read the partition data on the flash hard drive since it is RAW. The thumb drive can't install the needed files or interact with the Windows WMI files on the C drive nor the files and operating system pre-loaded on the hidden partitions to set this computer back to factory settings.

At this point I have stopped and am now looking to Acer's community group to give me some ideas of where I need to go from here.

I was able to get their Windows Product key from the units bios. Of course not much good for loading another copies of Windows 8.1 as this is not a unique product key but a bulk OEM code used by Acer. Can't use as an individual product code on a windows 8.1 downloaded directly from Microsoft. As well, I would rather have the factory Windows 8.1 with Bing these folks paid for.

I have already tried to repair MBR. No luck, Its as if the flash drive (hard drive) is locked out and no amount of commands from prompt so far has changed that status. I can see the drive, but as far as changing.....no luck.

Any help would be appreciated, and I thank you in advance.

Gary

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

JackE

You may have to resort to a "raw to ntfs converter". Try googling those term for examples.

 

Jack E/NJ

gdrag0n

Jack thank you for responding. I just posted a followup a few minutes ago.

Can you tell me for a fact that the Aspire Switch 10's hard drive (flash drive) is formatted NTFS on the primary and the hidden partitions?

 

Gary

JackE

My Switch's  C:\ boot is an NTFS partition along with hidden EFI system & recovery partitions.

 

Jack E/NJ 

joker1

Windows 10 came on my acer as and update and didnt work right either contacted acer they had to send me three of the recovery usb called them back told them that the media wasnt working right couldnt get no were with them told me to format hard drive this laptop wont let you but that still isnt going to help nothing there somthing wrong with the build on usb it called 9600 i havent had any luck either mine blue screens looses programs updates when you try to refresh says wrong media have files missing really i believe windows 8.1 with bing is a bunch of junck you cant even get a disk with this on it

 

JackE

>>>Windows 10 came on my acer as and update >>>

 

Have you tried the Alt+F10 erecovery method to your recover your factory-installed Windows? Jack E/NJ