How do I get a laptop to boot up again? ("No bootable devices found" F2, F9 etc not helping) Aspire

It's an Aspire A515-51, got it a couple years ago and it was a refurb then, so there's zero warranty chance on this. Tonight my dad ran into the "No bootable devices found" error. We've tried following the post saying to press F2 to enter BIOS or UEFI then hit F9 to load default configuration, etc etc etc. It did nothing, several times. It just wound up going to the 'automatic repair' page, which fails to fix the issue. Does anyone have any thoughts that don't involve taking apart the laptop? We have nothing else to plug the HDD into to see if it's the problem, so that's not really an option. ...Otherwise it's supposedly a "3 pound frisbee" as my dad has called it.

Accepted answers

JinyoungKim

Well, we just ended up getting another hard drive and getting the Windows tool to 'install Windows on a different PC' for his laptop and putting in the hard drive ourselves. That saved us from spending two to three hundred bucks on a new laptop or getting another hard drive and buying Windows for it, which was going to cost probably a hundred and eighty before it was all said and done. And if we had someone else do it, it was probably gonna cost another hundred for parts and labor. So getting away with around sixty for an HDD and twelve for a 64 gig flashdrive (needed at least 8 for the Windows DL, and this was somehow half the price of the 32 gig version (why, we have no clue)) is much easier and works fine. ...Aside having to start it up from scratch and fight getting Avast's premium to actually recognize "This code SHOULD still be viable, it's not an expired subscription and should cover multiple devices." It's pretty safe to say the old one is actually fried because random things on that lists disappeared several times, and never once did "SATA Mode" appear under any changeable option menu. It DID appear under "information" but you can't change anything there. We got lucky as far as cost, and I hope it goes well for others that may encounter this issue.

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brummyfan2

Hi,
You have to press F2 as soon as you press the power button(before the Acer logo appears), when you go to BIOS screen switch SATA Mode to different option( AHCI, Intel RST with Optane etc) and see whether it fixes the problem.

JinyoungKim

brummyfan2 said:

Hi,
You have to press F2 as soon as you press the power button(before the Acer logo appears), when you go to BIOS screen switch SATA Mode to different option( AHCI, Intel RST with Optane etc) and see whether it fixes the problem.

I don't get the same screen you do. SATA mode isn't in the menu. Everything else is there and the same as yours, and it looks exactly the same (aside the font being sans-serif/blocky style, so I think it might be slightly different somehow. And under Advanced under SATA Configuration both port options (0 and 1) just say "Enabled" and I could disable them. But neither change the mode.

JinyoungKim

Well, we just ended up getting another hard drive and getting the Windows tool to 'install Windows on a different PC' for his laptop and putting in the hard drive ourselves. That saved us from spending two to three hundred bucks on a new laptop or getting another hard drive and buying Windows for it, which was going to cost probably a hundred and eighty before it was all said and done. And if we had someone else do it, it was probably gonna cost another hundred for parts and labor. So getting away with around sixty for an HDD and twelve for a 64 gig flashdrive (needed at least 8 for the Windows DL, and this was somehow half the price of the 32 gig version (why, we have no clue)) is much easier and works fine. ...Aside having to start it up from scratch and fight getting Avast's premium to actually recognize "This code SHOULD still be viable, it's not an expired subscription and should cover multiple devices." It's pretty safe to say the old one is actually fried because random things on that lists disappeared several times, and never once did "SATA Mode" appear under any changeable option menu. It DID appear under "information" but you can't change anything there. We got lucky as far as cost, and I hope it goes well for others that may encounter this issue.

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