Aspire S3-391 - Cannot boot and can't disable Secure Boot

Znap
Znap Member Posts: 6 New User

I recently had my Aspire S3 repaired by Acer after my 500 GB HDD went bust. All fine and dandy, they returned it within a month with a new HDD, updated BIOS and Windows 8 installed. Since I already had Linux Mint installed, I wanted to reinstall it, from a live USB. First entered BIOS, set it to Legacy mode and booted from USB. Within the Mint installation, I deleted all partitions on both my SSD and my HDD, although maybe I should've left an EFI partition on either one. Thought that didn't matter since I installed from Legacy mode instead of UEFI.

 

With everything installed, I rebooted. Then, nothing happened. Several tries later, nothing continued to happen.

 

I have tried every single boot order, both in UEFI and in Legacy mode, I have tried both USB ports, I have created a new live USB-drive a few times but nothing works. When booting in Legacy mode, I get a blinking cursor in the upper left of a black screen, when booting in UEFI mode it tells me "no bootable device". What did I do wrong? I'm inclined to think it might have something to do with Secure Boot, which I didn't - and now cannot - disable.

 

I read somewhere that I might have had to disable it through Windows 8, which I didn't do because I didn't need to the previous time I installed Mint. I've already tried setting a BIOS password, but the only option it doesn't allow me to disable is Secure Boot. I'm at my wits end now... I would like very much to be able to boot from something... Any help is very much appreciated, as I'm truly becoming terribly frustrated with this. Thanks. Smiley Happy

Answers

  • MichaelLonewolf
    MichaelLonewolf Member Posts: 4 New User
    This is an easy one, what happened is Linux Mint changed your HDD, meaning that Linux uses it's own type of disk format, and you need to change your computer back to a NTFS system, here is a site that will walk you through that and get you back. http://forums.hardwaresecrets.com/convert-linux-hard/2367?s=eda72c5d48d03ef4cec79dbf66b3f67f& Good luck.
  • Znap
    Znap Member Posts: 6 New User
    Well, I asked Linux to change the file format to EXT4 of course. I wanted to get rid of Windows 8 altogether, so I had no need to keep that hard drive as ntfs. Just now, I managed to boot Windows 8 from USB, but couldn't complete the install because of a last minute 0x80070570 error. In the mean time, I had formatted both sda and sdb. Weirdly enough, when I rebooted from Legacy, it suddenly recognized my other usb-stick which had Ubuntu installed. So, right now I'm in a live Ubuntu environment and have the possibility to install from here. I'm kinda considering it, but since I want to give Mint another try, I think I'll create a third USB with Mint on it and see if that works. I still don't really understand what's happening, though. That BIOS/UEFI situation is really quite odd.
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