Acer Aspire ES1-111M -- free Windows 10 upgrade crashed

jm19495

I bought a new Acer Aspire ES1-111M-C40S a year and a half ago. It came withe label "Windows 10 Now" and "Free Windows 10 upgrade." I ran the upgrade successfully.

Two weeks ago the notebook/netbook crashed, and I could not boot into Windows. I could still access the boot menu by pressing F2 while turning on the power, but that didn't help.

Searching Acer online, and not finding any help, I finally found the Acer USB Recovery Drive compatible with my Aspire ES1-- 's SNID. I ordered it (cost me about $47 with tax you'd think a computer should come with recovery media).

Although I was able to boot from the recovery drive (I used the USB2 port -- I'd read online that this model of Acer has firmware problems and does not boot from USB3) -- it took several tries to recover and restore the computer. After several tries last night, I started it up again and turned in for the night. This morning, I had Windows 8.1.

Problem. I'd never used 8.1, and had bought this computer because of the upgrade offer. Seems the upgrade offer has expired, as of about a year ago. Is there any way of upgrading to 10 without buying Windows 10 from Microsoft? Can (or will, or would) Acer help.

Accepted answers

IronFly

from here and free:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10

you can click on update or download the tool to create a bootable USB flash drive and then update.

All comments

IronFly

from here and free:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10

you can click on update or download the tool to create a bootable USB flash drive and then update.

jm19495

Thanks for the tip -- but it didn't work. With a normal computer with a normal hard drive or SSD it probably would, but this Acer has a 32GB eMMC. But, with Windows 8.1 with Bing reinstalled (what it had before the upgrade to Windows 10 Home in Nov. 2015), it now appears to have 9.21GB used space and 6.78GB free space for total capacity of 15.9GB. I don't know why. But that 's only half the 32GB.

I did use the Windows tool to create a bootable flash drive, but the Acer won't boot into it, or rather, Windows tells me that it can't install.

Worse yet, the Acer running Windows 8.1 with Bing can't find a wireless network. Why? I don't know. N.B. this Acer does boot from a live Ubuntu usb into Ubuntu, and running Ubuntu I can connect to my wireless internet connection. So the problem seems to be a Windows problem, not a hardware problem. But I'm at a loss.

Thanks for you suggestion, anyway.

IronFly

you need to add some storage to be able to update, i suggest you a 64GB or bigger SD that must be NTFS formatted; then you will be able to upgrade to windows 10.

jm19495

To my amazement, Windows 10 Home edition is once again up and running on my Acer Aspire.

I ran the recovery media usb from Acer again last night, then let it finish running overnight. By morning Windows 8.1 with Bing was again functioning and the system recognized my WiFi connection. When I checked disk space I found > 9GB free; before, it had only been 6+ GB, sometimes less, and whenever I tried the in place Windows 10 upgrade using the tool at ... /software-download/windows10, I got the error message that I needed 8GB. Now, having above 9GB, I ran the upgrade.

I chose the erase everything and install Windows 10 option. Windows 10 Home is working -- I'm typing this on the Aspire. After the installation of 10, disk usage indicated 18GB free of 28.9GB. Now, after upgrades downloaded, 15.6GB free. Apparently the "erase and install" option cleared a lot of extraneous junk from the eMMC.

One thing about your suggestion that I use a 64GB or larger SD. When I first got this Aspire in about Nov. 2015 and upgraded it to 10 Home, I bought a 64GB usb3 thumb drive (a stubby SanDisk model, that doesn't stick out very far) to use for storage. I've plugged it back in now, with Windows 10 operating again. I've just plugged an SD card into the slot at the side of the Aspire, and see that it shows up in Local Storage as well.

Thanks for the advice.

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