Legacy boot, what did I ever do to you?

[HCHTech]

I guess it's going to be one of those days.

I have an mid-2013 Acer laptop on my bench with the reported symptom of "Touchpad not working". Customer reports that it hasn't worked since she upgraded to Win8.1 about 6 months ago. She has been using an external mouse. Also, two other techs and her brother-in-law have all tried and failed to fix the problem - my favorite kind of project... Ugh.

I fire it up in front of the customer. Indeed, the touchpad does not work. Hitting the FN key to turn it on or off does not make a difference. External mouse works. I send the customer on her way and put it in queue.

The touchpad only shows in hidden devices in device manager, with an error by the driver. I locate, download and install the latest driver. No change.

I run my hardware tests, there are no failures. No smart errors and a short test in GSmartControl passes.

I boot into Linux and note that the touchpad does not work there either. Ok, so either the pad has failed, or it's cable is unhooked, or the motherboard connection is broken, something like that. Or...maybe it is turned off in the BIOS. I decide to check that out first.

It is now that I take a backup with FABs. Then, I boot into the BIOS. I note that there is no control for the touchpad there, and then I decide I want to run another tool that boots from a USB stick, so I disable Secureboot and turn on legacy boot. In retrospect, I should not have done this.

Next, I shut it down and tear it apart to check the cable connections. I remove and reseat both ends of the touchpad ribbon cable, which was not loose or disconnected. The Hard drive is on a cable connection, so I remove and reseat that while I'm in there. I put it all back together and fire it up again, only to be greeted with at attempt to boot from the network and then an "Operating System Not Found" message. Oops.

Oh, right, I changed it to Legacy boot - I need to change it back. Unfortunately, it will NOT go into the BIOS with the normal F2 on boot. I cannot get into Windows, so I cannot reboot into the BIOS that way (Shift on restart, choose to boot into BIOS). The F2 keystroke is clearly being detected because if I hold it down, I can hear the clicks when the buffer gets full. I tear it apart again just to make sure the hard drive is plugged in correctly - it is.

Ok, so NOW I Google a bit and find that at least for some folks, upgrading the BIOS fixes this problem. Should have done this earlier.

I've tried booting from a Win8.1 install disk, but that doesn't offer me a boot to the BIOS. I test the hard disk again with a long test this time and it still passes. Holding down the power button for a minute with the battery and power disconnected doesn't change the behavior.

So...here I am. I need to get back to the BIOS but cannot. Ugh. Just for kicks, I throw in a spare hard drive and Windows 8.1 installs just fine. Still no touchpad, of course. Because Windows was installed with Legacy boot (I'm guessing), I don't get the option to boot to the BIOS when I Shift/Restart.

My next step is to see if I can get the BIOS upgrade, I guess, but I wanted to take some time away from the problem to think on it a bit...and post here for suggestions.

tldr; I stupidly switched to legacy boot on a Win8.1 machine and now Windows won't boot and I can't get back into the BIOS to put it back.

This is what I get for taking a long holiday weekend!

Edit: Downloading & installing the BIOS upgrade with the new install switched it back to UEFI, which caused the new Windows install to report "Operating System Not Found". I put the original HD back in and it boots fine. Still no touchpad, so I'm off to price a top plate. Man, that was a long way round the barn! Note to self - try to avoid legacy mode in the future!

 

[Adept PC Repair]

May be worthwhile getting a £20 universal bios programmer from China. Worth the investment for future problems.

Does need some soldering for laptop motherboard bios removal and soldering to the adapters.

 

[glennd]

I seem to recall some of these laptops require you to press and hold F2 (?) before and during pressing the power button.

 

[FremontPC]

Man, that was a long way round the barn! Note to self - try to avoid legacy mode in the future!

Yeah, I'd check glennd's solution. Likely there's a trick to it on certain Acers. Sometimes there's a boot options menu that will list an option to go into BIOS or "setup", often f12 or f10, but check the docs.

As for the touchpad, you might want to review this, seems your customer isn't the only one:

http://community.acer.com/t5/Notebo...nd-Windows-8-1-Acer-Aspire-E5-511/td-p/288552

 

[glennd]

Yeah, I'd check glennd's solution. Likely there's a trick to it on certain Acers. Sometimes there's a boot options menu that will list an option to go into BIOS or "setup", often f12 or f10, but check the docs.

As for the touchpad, you might want to review this, seems your customer isn't the only one:

http://community.acer.com/t5/Notebo...nd-Windows-8-1-Acer-Aspire-E5-511/td-p/288552

I have a customer with a 2014 Acer Aspire E15 (or E5-521, not sure, I wrote down two different model numbers ) laptop and the touchpad on it is total crap. It doesn't have discreet mouse buttons on it like most proper laptops and getting to left click was hit and miss. I tried to update the drivers and that made it worse. In the end I told the customer the hardware is faulty and it should go back to the shop for warranty repairs. Guess what the shop said?

I was just perusing the repair notes and found the following:

F2 + power = BIOS : Enable F12 boot menu, Disable UEFI = allows boot to USB

then, of course, you have to undo all of that to get it back to normal.

 

[HCHTech]

your customer isn't the only one:

Yeah, I'll bet it boils down to needing a BIOS update that hasn't been written yet. I know about the F2, and tried that unsuccessfully out of the gate to access the BIOS after I had changed it to Legacy mode. Ultimately, reinstalling Win8.1 using a spare hard drive allowed me to upgrade the BIOS to the latest version, which in turn ended up in UEFI mode so I could re-insert the original drive and be on my way. Nothing in that thread worked for me, but my model was newer than the ones mentioned in the thread.

It's also possible that the pad itself is just junk and has failed...

So, either way - I offered to get a new top plate to see if that would work, but the customer decided to just keep using the external mouse. I'll only get a diagnostic fee out of this, but I'm glad to get it off my bench in any event.