Short: Are there any known issues with the InsydeH20 Setup Utility (Rev 5) and/or BIOS V1.11 spontaneously resetting to factory defaults? Lost BIOS changes to SATA, Secure Boot &c after 2 days of use.
Details:
Acer Aspire 5 A515-54-30BQ; i3-8145U
Replaced NVME w/ Intel p660 1TB
Added Crucial DDR4 2400 8GB RAM (from Crucial compat checker) (12GB total)
Elementary OS 5.1 Hera
I've had this laptop less than a week. Two days of hardware sanity testing the original config (Win10, Kingston 128GB SSD, 4G RAM): No hardware issues w/ kbd, screen (1 dead pixel, acceptable for the price), network (better than expected from reviews! yay) &c. Checked for BIOS/firmware updates, etc. I've spent 20+ years in tech, generally competent at these tasks.
Replaced SSD, preserving Kingston w/ Win10 for now (just in case).
Linux install required BIOS changes:
- Supervisor password (temporary)
- Boot Tab: Secure Boot: Disabled
- Main Tab: SATA mode: AHCI
- Main Tab: Boot Priority Order
- Unset Supervisor password.
Installed Ubuntu 19.10 for testing. No issues in another day of testing and simple updates.
Added Crucial 8Gb RAM. At this point, Ubuntu prompted a BIOS update (V1.11), listing RAM support.
Did that, and the update lost the current BIOS settings - unpleasant, but not surprising, and easy to fix: This is not the problem, but a possible early symptom. Brief sanity testing, everything still looks good.
Installed ElementaryOS 5.1 (Hera) for more testing (prep as Christmas gift). Basic install went well, simple first app updates go well.
I started testing System Settings, in order, all good, until Mouse & Touchpad -> Pointing. Tried using keypad to control pointing (worked), but then when I turned that off I lost mouse click; trackpad would still move the cursor, but not activate anything. OK, maybe a software bug, "don't do that". Power down laptop w/ power button. On wall power, with full battery, so unlikely that there was any power glitch.
Power on... nope, won't start. Hangs on the Elementary boot screen briefly, then blank for a minute. Power cycle again, spend a few seconds in grub to see that it can't see the system SSD. Ah, seen that before: SATA mode is wrong!
Restart into BIOS and discover all values reset to factory defaults: Secure Boot enabled, SATA in PRT+optane. No way I see I could have reset the BIOS while Elementary was running, and reasonably certain that I didn't hit any keys getting back to the BIOS (e.g., F9 to restore defaults). Redo BIOS changes, Elementary boots fine.
Tried to reproduce pointer and/or BIOS fault by retesting Settings -> Mouse -> Pointing &c; cannot reproduce loss of mouse control nor any other issue.
So, as I continue configuration, my question is: Are there any known issues with BIOS v1.11 and/or InsydeH20 Setup auto-resetting to factory defaults? Any "unexpected" user actions that could cause this?
