No bootable device got a pop up didn’t have enough space on his hard drive in Acer A115-31

Jaxd

My son has an acer aspire laptop that he decided to upgrade to windows 11. He says he had the option to upgrade from his computer settings. While the upgrade was installing, He got a pop up that said he didn’t have enough space on his hard drive, he was given the option to save it else where so he chose to save it to his sea gate external hard drive. A day later while the computer was off, his cousin unplugged the external hard drive and then turned the computer on. Ever since then his computer goes straight to a black screen that says “no bootable device.” We have tried plugging the external hard drive back in and we still get the “no bootable device” error.

[Edited the thread to add model name to the title and issue detail]

StevenGen

https://community.acer.com/en/discussion/674437/no-bootable-device

What is the exact Aspire laptops model number, as these dreaded “no bootable device” sounds like its because of the usual older and small M.2 boot drives OEM capacities that Acer fitted to their laptops of capacities of the ridiculously low 128GB or 256GB M.2 drives. If you have valuable data on these drives, then take both of these drives (the external Seagate and the boot drive) to a professional data recovery technician, as trying to recover any data will damage these hard drives and you will lose your data, so be warned as I take no responsibility if you attempt to do the below guide.

What I would do if your data is not valuable is to buy a new and a higher capacity boot drive of a type M.2 NVMe 1TB PCIe 3 x4 and do a Clean Install of Win-11 version 22H2 OS build 22621.819 (which is the latest) that you can download onto an 8GB bootable USB from Microsoft and you can do a Clean Install of Win-11 version 22H2 OS build 22621.819. That is the best and easiest way to fix and get over this problem.

Jaxd

Thank you for your response! He has an a115-31. He’s not worried about saving any data. Would we also be able to do the same thing with windows 10 as he completely regrets downloading windows 11 and doesn’t like the layout of it.

JackE

StevenGen It's an a115-31 with a 64GB SSD card. Son claims to have booted Win11 from an external drive like the no-longer-supported Win2Go.

Jaxd

No, I was mistaken. Once he got home he clarified that he upgraded through his settings. He said his computer kept telling him that it was recommending him to update.

JackE

OK. I suspect that your son clicked on the flashing Win11 upgrade billboard on the Win10 update settings that proclaimed, congratulations, this computer is ready for the Win11 .upgrade or something to that effect. My concern is with the smallish 64GB size of the boot SSD card. While Win11 might fit, the temporary drive space needed to complete the installation itself might not be enough. It should be enough for Win10 installation but not sure about Win11. This particular model is usually sold with either a 128GB or 256GB factory installed boot card. That's why I asked earlier where the machine came from with only the 64GB card..

Jaxd

He saved money up and we purchased it on Amazon.

Jaxd

I think he had around $250.

JackE

>>>He got a pop up that said he didn’t have enough space on his hard drive,>>>e purchased it on Amazon>>>

OK. I think found it. Looks like a less expensive production model with a non-replaceable 64GB SSD boot drive. While the drive seems to be OK, it just isn't big enough for a full Win11 installation without using another drive. A removable external drive is obviously not a good choice especially if system files that Win11 relies are missing.

Try this.

1. With the machine turned off, plug the Seagate drive back in to the SAME USB port used in the Win11 upgrade process.
2. Then turn the machine on and IMMEDIATELY tap F2 to enter the BIOS menu again.
3. If both the Sandisk and Seagate now show up in the BIOS Information tab, wait a minute or so to let the Seagate iniitalize and spin up to full speed.
4. This time, only press F10 to save settings and exit the BIOS menu to see if it will boot.

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