SF514-55T - HDD not available in BIOS, but can be seen and formatted in Installers

ede_zimmermann · May 24

Hi there,

i often change the OS's on this laptop and remember having had the same problem before some month ago. Unfortunately i did not note the solution then and am not able to find it again online.

This is what happened: The last OS on the notebook was a Fedora, which i did not like too much. So i decided to install Arch Linux, which i use on my desktop since a few months. After completing the installation process with setting up an EFI, a swap and an ext4 partition i finally rebooted, returning in "No boot device found" message. Looking up the BIOS i found that the HDD did show up in the information tab correctly as "Micron_2210_MTFDHBA1T0QFD", but it does not show up in the Boot menu of the InsydeH20 Setup utility. Because of this the laptop cannot be set to boot from the disk any longer!

I tried to repartition and reformat the disk a few times using different tools like fdisk, gdisk, sfdisk and gparted. This can be done without a problem, the disk is being recognized as /dev/nvme0n1 by all of these tools and the partition table can be written ant then formatted. Nevertheless the disk does not show up in InsydeH20 setup utility's boot menu.

I think to remember that there was a hidden option inside the BIOS which had to be activated, but my memory might fool me with that. Has anybody got an idea how to get on with that?

egydiocoelho · May 25

Go to main bios tab, press ctrl+s and disable VMD CONTROLLER!

ede_zimmermann · May 24

Forgot to mention: The BIOS (InsydeH20) Version is 1.08, which seems to be the latest version available.

ede_zimmermann · May 25

Still stuck with that problem. Read a reddit thread explaining three different variants of unlocking InsydeH20's Advanced BIOS options, but none of them worked for me.

Tried to reinstall the BIOS, but Acer only offers an exe for BIOS update. Executed the exe in a Windows 10 VM on my desktop system, but it wants to be executed on the system where the BIOS is installed. Why does Acer do this? You can not update the BIOS if the BIOS is wrecked and does not allow acces to the installed HDD? Seriously???

Any help appreciated, got no idea how to get on with that...

egydiocoelho · May 25

Go to main bios tab, press ctrl+s and disable VMD CONTROLLER!

ede_zimmermann · May 25

Great, this was the hidden option i had not noted the first time i met this problem! Thank you very much! Unfortunately this time it seems not to be the only problem, since the HDD still does not show up in "Boot priority order". But you were definitely pointing in the right direction with your hint and i will further investigate the problem tomorrow. Will let you know if and how i got it worked out.

billsey · May 26

The HDD should not show up in Boot Priority Order, only Windows Boot Manager (or an alternate boot manager if you are running a different OS). When you go into the boot menu with F12 (which has to be enabled in the BIOS first) then any UEFI bootable device will show up.

ede_zimmermann · May 26

Thank you billsey, you are obviously right. Experimenting with the diverse bootloaders i had left the HDD without a proper boot manager.

I was able to install an OS now and have learned two important lessons. (Ctrl+S for "VMD Controller" and the true nature of "Boot priority order", which should have been obvious but sometimes, you know...)

Very helpful forum you got here. :-)

billsey · May 29

I sometimes wish the BIOS people had just changed the nomenclature for that "Boot Priority Order" menu. They wanted to keep it as close to the same as it had been with early Windows 7 builds but it would make more sense to rename it to something like Boot Manager Priority instead. There are so many people who get confused because their hardware doesn't show up.