Aspire V3 - suddenly can't save ANY bios settings

Acer Aspire V3 112p laptop
BIOS version 1.16
OS = Linux Mint (UEFI boot)
Yesterday I wanted to change to Legacy boot mode to boot at an OS stored on USB stick that wouldn't boot in UEFI mode. Surprise, surprise, I changed to Legacy but I could not save the configuration. Then I discovered that I couldn't save ANY changes!! Not even the bios user password. WTF? To make matters worse, even though the F12 boot menu is accessable, the system won't recognize bootable devices in either the SD or USB ports. I've been using this BIOS version for at least a year, so that shouldn't be the issue. I haven't made any hardware changes either. The ONLY thing I've done, and this was well before this incident happened, was to change from Legacy boot mode to UEFI.

eightwt

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Sharanji

eightwt

No, it’s not possible, you would have to reinstall Windows if you change the Boot mode. If you wipe the entire drive, you would need the Windows recovery media that you may have created with your system. Resetting to any sort of defaults will likely put the system back to UEFI mode with Secure Boot enabled, which will prevent your OS from loading until you re-enable Legacy mode.

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eightwt

Well, I don't share your pessimism. This system never did have a Windows installation, so I have nothing to recover to. The SSD was clean when I installed it and I used Linux Mint 18 in Legacy boot mode. I recently added the UEFI partition so I could boot Mint using UEFI mode with Secure Boot disabled. I was able to set a user password and disable Secure Boot to make this work. Now, all of a sudden anything I change in the BIOS cannot be saved, and I don't just mean going from UEFI to Legacy boot.