I am locked out of the BIOS - A517-52G-7998

I can enter the BIOS with the F2 key, but the only menu I can make selections on is the Exit menu. I had set the Supervisor, User and HDD1 passwords al set to the same string (and I've not forgotten them). When the system starts, I am prompted for the HDD1 Lock password, which I can enter.

I then get a second prompt 'Enter Password'. If I enter the supervisor password I enter the BIOS but can't make changes. If I deliberately simply press Enter it reports that the password check failed. If I repeat that three times, I get another popup menu 'Enter Unlock Password' or 'System Shutdown' . When I select Enter Unlock Password, I get a prompt 'Enter Unlock Password (Key: 1003676178)'. If I enter that number or the supervisor password that i set, a popup with a beige background reports '<null string> Press Any Key'. The ony way to get out of an endlesscyce of this is to select System Shutdown.

I tried disconnecting the CMOS battery overnight (it's easy to do, the battery is beneath the NVME SDD and it has a two wire connecter which can be disconnected without removing anything further.

Removing the CMOS battery did lose the system date and time, it did not clear the passwords or restore the ability to select anything in the BIOS menu.

I need to switch off the setting of the keyboard Function keys as ;media switches' and to change the HDD1 mode from RST to ACPI, as I've installed a Linux distribution, meaning I don't have anything left from the Windows that came with the laptop (incuding the recovery partition)

Does anyone know how to really reset the BIOS?

[Thread edited to add model name]

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jimsegrave

addition to previous post. I found the you-tube video on getting the unlock password, this did reset the BIOS. Unfortunately, I still still can't get into any menus, including (most importanty) the Boot BIOS menu where I can change the Boot order to start with the Linux installed UEFI coniguration in pace of the Windows ones (which won't work because Windows is gone)

JackE

Try tapping F12 on startup to see if the Linux bootloader shows up.

jimsegrave

It doe not do o. If I inert the bootable Linux install USB stick it shows up on the boot page, but, because I can't select thing on any pages, I can't place it ahead of the BIOS expected Windows EFI koader

Commodore_1995#

What is the exact model? Example PH315-52. Can you sed some photos of the bios settings?

JackE

>>>If I inert the bootable Linux install USB stick it shows up on the boot page, but, because I can't select thing on any pages, I can't place it ahead of the BIOS expected Windows EFI koader>>>

Please show a phone photo of the menu page that you're referring to that shows the Linux install stick. Quite often you must use another i/o device to navigate these menus because they are very rudimentary.. Try the TAB key to navigate. Or another mouse. Or the touchpad. You may have to press FN+F7 to get navigation. Also post a phone photo of the BIOS Information page if possible.

As an aside, I suspect that because the WinBootMgr is still visible, the option to install Linux alongside Windows was selected but the Windows system partition was somehow wiped and EFI partition retained either before or during the remainder of the installation. This can probably account for the BIOS issues you're seeing now. You may regain BIOS access by temporarily disconnecting the boot drive.

jimsegrave

My Acer laptop shows the model number as A517-52G-7998, manufactured 2022/06/21 on the sticker on the back, For security reasons (not that I'm actually worried), I cropped the Main screen image to omit the serial number and following lines.

I'm not sure if I'll be permitted to post this. I've made a zip file of photos of the different BIOS screens (cropped to reduce the size as much as possible but it is 1MB and may well be blocked as a binary file).

There are two Boot screens, one normal and one with a bootable USB stick inserted. The USB stick can be booted on a UEFI systems, in fact it's what I used to install Linux on this laptop. After the Linux install, I successfully rebooted several times both with and without the USB stick.

The only screen where the up and down arrows function is the Exit screen so I can choose to save changes or not and then exit. since I can't actually select anything on the other screens, there won't be any changes to save.

When booting, it reports an error that the Windows system can't be found, which is true - I overwrote everything but the EFI partition with Linux xfs file systems. Once Linux was installed, the Boot page showed Rocky Linux and Windows as boot options.

When Linux booted, it did not see the 1Tb hard disk, only the nvme 1/2TB drive. I noticed that there was an option to unlock HDD1 in the BIOS if I set a hard drive password. I foolishly set that password, the supervisor password and the user password. I could still boot into Linux, I still could not see the 1TB drive. I later found out that the BIOS was using Intels RST mode, which isn't supported in this version of Linux, but that I could supposedly switch the drive to AHCI mode, which Linux does by pressing Control-S on the BIOS Main page. And this is where things started to go wrong. Since it didn't help, i wanted to remove the HDD1 password, but you can't (as far as I could tell) actually do so without resetting the BIOS. After some go-rounds with the BIOS, I got the unlock passwords (using biosbug,com) which stopped the prompting for a supervisor or HDD1 password, The down side is that the BIOS no longer looked at the installed Linux EFI files and ony wanted Windows, which now was gone.l

I have a query in to Acer support about their restore-media which is supposed to put back all the lost (or in my case removed) data. I don't know if my laptop can be convinced to try to use such a restore stick, so I'm waiting for a response. Otherwise it looks like sending my laptop back to rheir support facilities to fix things.

Any solution that gets me into BIOS supervisor mode or otherwise boots me into Windows would be fine. There's no data on the Linux install to preserve, it was only the first day after the initial install

r

acer-screens.zip

JackE

What additional options appear if any when you press Ctrl+S in the MAIN tab?
Can you access and enable the F12 boot option with up/down arrows or tab key? Even using the touchpad?
The time/date stamp is messed up. The security tab is also messed up.
The BIOS firmware seems to have been corrupted.
If you're not able to access anything, what happens when you temporarily disconnect the boot drive?

jimsegrave

1) Nothing happens when I press Control-S in the Main menu (or any other one, for what that's worth)

2) Tab, Fn-F7, the touchpad. nothing enables me to access any option on any menu except the Exit page. It appears to be locked out of Supervisor mode, so no settings are accessible for changes

3) The date and time were reset when I removed the CMOS battery for a while to (I hoped) reset the Ram the BIOS uses. The date went back to 00:00:00 01/01/2019. Since it's never since been bootable, it's not had any external reference to update the date and time and it won't allow me to attempt it.

I'll wait a bit before opening the case to remove the NVME drive

JackE

>>>>I later found out that the BIOS was using Intels RST mode, which isn't supported in this version of Linux, but that I could supposedly switch the drive to AHCI mode,>>>

You can but changing from iVMD or iRST mode to AHCI must be done in a certain way long before you even try to install Linux. Else the mainboard's drive controller will make BIOS access to the HDD/SSD EFI partition go haywire. That's why it's important to remove the drive to see if you can regain control of the BIOS firmware. If not, we may have to try to reflash the BIOS using a WinPE boot stick.

jimsegrave

The primary storage is the 512GB SSD. The presence or absence of the 1TB doesn't affect the initial installation. The EFI partition used for booting is on the SSD, not the ordinary hard disk. Linux was installed on and running from the nvme SSD, which is also where the Windows directories were originally located. I'm guessing that the 1TB drive has an ntfs fie system and partitioning, but it won't be relevant to my current problems.

The question is whether or not the system can be rebooted from any sort of recovery tool (such as Acer's restore media). If the nvme drive has to be removed to boot a recovery tool, then it won't be able to restore the Windows content on the nvme drive, so it wan't actually have restored the system at all.

JackE

Sorry. I am in fact referring to whichever drive is the boot drive with the EFI partition. That would be what you call the primary storage. Whether an SSD, HDD, an m.2 connector or a 2.5" SATA3 connector is not relevant. If the primary storage or boot drive a 512GB m.2 card, then that's the one I'm referring to. It would only be temporarily disconnected, (not permanently removed) to see if you can re-gain access to the to BIOS firmware.

jimsegrave

It's late here and I'm not willing to open the case when I'm getting tired, it will probably have to wait until Tuesday. If removing the drive allows me to access the items on the various screens, what would I have to set to escape from the you-are-not-supervisor lock that seems to be present here?

JackE

Hard to predict at this point till the boot drive is disconnected. If the BIOS firmware is truly corrupt --- and If the lock remains--- and if the BIOS firmware still can't be controlled--- then we can try to re-flash the corrupted BIOS within a WindowsPE pre-installation environment loaded from a bootable WinPE stick.