Alpha Switch 12 - No Bootable Device Found

SriSurya

My Acer Alpha Switch 12 tablet-pc is not booting up and after the Acer logo screen it goes straight to "No Bootable Device Found". Obviously, I started going over all the relative solutions posted on this forum (and ton of other sites, YT videos) and here's a summary of the thing I have tried till now (but didn't find any luck) - Appreciate any pointers from you all.

1. I first had to figure how to get to the Boot screen as I couldn't get there through F2, F10, ESC keys (or any other possible Function keys suggested out there). I eventually used Power + Volume Up button combo to get there. Then I tried resetting the ‘System Time’ & ‘System Date’ under ‘Main’ menu to current time and date.

2. I changed ‘Boot Mode’ to ‘Legacy’ (from UEFI) and saved, exited boot menu. System restarted and ran into following error

“ASIX (PCI 00:14.0) starting execution….ok

ASIX PXE initialize…done

No more network devices

…No bootable device – insert boot disk and press any key”

3. Next I changed ‘Boot Mode’ back to ‘UEFI’ and changed the ‘Boot Priority Order’ to ‘USB FDD’ (from ‘HDD : HFS256G38TND-N210A’). Inserted a bootable USB with Windows 10 and restarted the system. I wanted to pointed one strange thing here – When I tried to do this today (after I had not turned on the tablet for few days) I saw ‘Windows Boot Manager’ as the first option in ‘Boot Priority Order’ and for some reason when the tablet restarted that option was no longer there.

4. Windows installation screen popped-up after the last step and in the screen where it says ‘Install now’ and ‘Repair your computer”, I chose the latter and selected ‘Troubleshoot’ and then tried the below options –

Startup Repair – Result: “Startup Repair couldn’t repair your PC”

Uninstall Updates (Quality & Feature) – Result: “We ran into a problem and won’t be able to uninstall the latest quality/feature update of Windows”

System Restore – “To use System Restore, you must specify which Windows installation to restore” (I don’t remember setting up a restore point before so I didn’t pursue this anymore)

System Image Recover – “Windows cannot find a system image on this computer” (Makes sense – didn’t setup a restore image either – Note to self – start doing this once you get this fixed)

5. After exhausting the above ‘Advanced Options’, I moved on to ‘Command Prompt’ and tried the below things

Diskpart:

X:\windows\system32> diskpart

DISKPART> select disk 0

DISPART> list vol

The only volume is saw was “Volume 0 | C | ESD-USB | FAT32 | Removable | 14 GB | Healthy”. I didn’t see any of the other volumes from HDD (as suggested in the online solutions)

6. Then I moved on to “bootrec” and tried below commands – When I restarted after executing them, Windows still didn’t boot up

“X:\Windows\System32>bootrec /fixmbr

The operation completed successfully.
X:\Windows\System32>bootrec /fixboot

Access is denied.
X:\Windows\System32>bootrec /rebuildbcd

Scanning all disks for Windows installations.

Please wait, since this may take a while…

Successfully scanned Windows installations.

Total identified Windows installations: 0

The operation completed successfully.”

 

7. Finally I decided to do a fresh install and performed the following steps –

 Which type of installation do you want?

“Upgrade: Install Windows and keep files, settings, and applications” or “Custom: Install Windows only (advanced)”

I chose option 2 (initially I chose option 1 and it threw an error “The upgrade option isn’t available if you start your computer using Windows installation media”)

 

Where do you want to install Windows?

“Drive 0 Unallocated Space : Total Size 238.5 GB, Free space 238.5 GB”

There was an error at the bottom of this screen - “Windows can’t be installed on this drive. Show details – Windows cannot be installed to this disk. The disk may fail soon. If other hard disks are available, install Windows to another location”

 

When I clicked ‘Next’ anyway, I got the error “We couldn’t install Windows in the location you chose. Please check your media drive. Here’s more info about what happened: 0x80300002.”

 

So this is where I’m stuck. If you managed to read all the way till here, I appreciate your patience and hope you can provide a solution! Thanks.

StevenGen

Firstly, you have broken the cardinal rule of “Not Baking Your System Up” with a reputable backup software, I use the excellent “Macrium Reflect 7 Free” that you can use onto an external drive, btw, I use their purchased software, also and after installing the software, install their “Boot Menu option for system Image recovery” to have their recovery boot software at boot so that you can recover all backups, this works 100% especially in your type of situations.

Anyway, it’s too late now and its too long to explain to you in detail here of how to do a "repair" of all that you have done, but and as you have already attempted to do a clean install and have deleted and lost your personal files, then you have to do a clean install of Win-10, so do it this way. You need to completely format your OEM boot drive and all its partitions (which is one of the 1st step of a pre clean install) see this extensive and comprehensive guide (which explains and outlines all aspects of backing up, installation and what/how to make media) here How to do a clean installation of Windows 10 and for the “How to perform clean install of Windows 10” go down to the last guide at the bottom of this article page and see there. Good luck.

Btw, the Error 0x80300002 is caused by partition errors (or your drive is faulty/defective use chkdsk or and if you have any faults use diskpart at cmd prompt pre installation for the boot drive) and/or you have a corrupted Windows installation media due to which you won't be able to complete your Windows installation. So check your USB installation media and do it again.

Select the partition with the current installation (usually "Drive 0"), and click the Delete button.


Select empty drive Drive 0 Unallocated Space to install a clean Win-10 into, then click next

billsey

It sounds to me like the SSD has failed. You are getting the error because the installer either can't write to it or the SMART test is returning imminent failure. Likely your best bet is to replace the SSD with another (good chance for a size upgrade). The motherboard supports a single M.2 SATA drive in the 2280 form factor.