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A friend of mine sent me this picture last night saying her laptop will only boot to the BIOS screen
http://i58.tinypic.com/148lrtt.jpg
can anyone shed any light on this please and help me get it back working. She has college work on it that is due Friday.
It is Win 8
many thanks in advance
well the dates wrong but shouldn't stop it booting, maybe the bios has lost some settings and the hd is no longer set to boot.
hard work with just the one page showing I am afraid, if the bios battery has gone flat it would reset every time she shut it down.
does it ask her to press f1 to continue or f2 to enter bios.
does it go to a black screen after bios and say no op system found.
if so press F12 (or whatever is the boot menu) on start up and wait till the choices menu comes up and select the hard drive.
It seems it boots straight into the bios, tapping F keys has no effect..as the machine isn't near me I can't get at it to try anything either...
Spilt something on the keyboard and F2/Del/F12 button stuck down?
Very unusual for a laptop to load straight to BIOS without any intervention.
Remove keyboard, add USB keyboard, Boot. See what happens.
If works, replace keyboard for around £20 from eBay.
Can also be caused by the hard drive failing as it cant see anything to boot from so goes into the bios
A screenshot of the boot menu in the BIOS would be handy to see what the boot order is and if a HDD is detected.
Also I am not sure what secure boot does but perhaps the time/date affects that just how webpages fail to load if the date is well out. Worth correcting the time and date.
Also it is possible that the CMOS battery is flat (as said above) and it says press F1 to continue or F2 to enter setup.
Windows 8, UEFI Motherboard from a PC, from ASUS, doing the same thing (Fair few ideas for fault finding too).
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/answer...y-windows.html
Welcome to the headache that is UEFI! :p
lol, can't select boot configuration..
what about re-enabling CSM and disabling secure boot, will that do anything?
Shouldn't do but worth a go, I really hate uefi/secure boot.
Enabling CSM (Compatibility Support Module) is or if you intend on installing Windows 7 to it (backwards compatibility).
Because it's a preinstalled version on Windows 8, it needs to have 'Secure Boot' enabled for it to work - and something called 'Windows Boot Manager' deals with the MBR's or GPT's.
Secure Boot was introduced as a counter-measure against SLIC v2.1 spoofing. Didn't go well seeing as activation can be intimated easily using KMS solutions.
Is the laptop in your possession yet mc.dodd?
I reckon, because secure boot is enabled, there is a problem with the hard drives boot partition. UEFI is blaming its own settings as it cannot see it. Thus booting straight into it.
Has she made any Windows 8 DVD Recovery media?
If not, the easiest work around is to reinstall Windows 8 Core with CSM enabled as though it is a Retail version of Windows 8, instead of the OEM shit that comes already in it.
I had to send an Acer PC back to the manufacturer because of Secure Boot before under warranty (threads here). Was more hassle posting it than actually reinstalling from scratch.
--edit
Another interesting fuck up I learnt.
To recover your PC in Windows 8 if preinstalled, you need to be able to actually load into Windows 8 in order to be able to RECOVER it (unless you created the recovery media). I mean, really. WTF?
You have to initiate a Recovery Boot from within Windows 8... some real great thinking went into that!! No F8 / Repair anymore.
no, I can't get to the machine, but she has turned off secure boot and it's gone into repair mode, now has a screen saying choose an option:
exit and continue to windows 8
trouble shoot
turn off PC
I guess it's continue..
http://i62.tinypic.com/11skwty.jpg
Getting it away from BIOS is a start. I'd have gone with Troubleshoot. But either or.
I think in the troubleshoot section you can get to advanced options but can't remember, the recovery process is a pile of shit. You can re-enable the advanced boot menu but have to be in windows to do that... I had problems with a brand new win 8 laptop and the manufacturer told me to disconnect the battery, power it on, pull the power cord, repeat a few times until it forced it into the recovery menu. Makes me swear just thinking about it, useless fuckwits came up with these new systems.
it's apparently doing a repair(about an hour it says) lol..just have to wait and see what happens after that! thankfully she had the sense to back everything up on google drive...
bloody hassal this UEFI thing..!!
Just a thought but has she try to reset the bios back to default