Acer Aspire ES 14 can't boot from USB

[peppyto]

Hi friends,

Just got an Acer Aspire ES 14 and wanted to reinstall windows 10.

Set up a bootable USB with windows 10 image using Rufus.

Everytime I try to boot, it always opens up the current win10 set up.

I've changed the boot order in the BIOS (in F2) and also tried with the F12 boot manager, but the option to boot from the USB key is just not there

Really not sure what I'm doing wrong, if anyone has any ideas please let me know

Thank you in advance!

Nicolas

 

[Karadjgne]

Have you dug through the bios and made sure usb is turned on? There can be a switch, off/partial/full USB at boot, or something similar.

 

[peppyto]

Dear Karadjgne,

Thank you for your reply!!!

I did go through the bios extensively and did not find any option to "turn on the usb". Would you mean a physical switch?

My laptop can recognize the USB and the boot program while in windows. But I wish to reset my hard drive and do a complete fresh reinstall without all the added Acer software.

I will try to add pictures of my bios screen, etc once I get the chance. If anyone on the other hand has an idea?

Could it be that the usb stick is not bootable? Does that exist?

 

[Karadjgne]

No, lol, it's not a physical switch as such, but a setting, usually under boot section or sometimes under advanced, where usb among other things has a setting that'll not enable, partially enable or fully enable USB support during the boot process. It's design was to save energy at boot by not allowing any externally connected peripherals to engage, or partially engage etc. There's plenty of older, legacy stuff that conflicts with USB at boot until windows is running and windows drivers are activated. So that switch enables you to turn off USB ports if it's needed.

 

[peppyto]

So finally got to taking pictures. If you see something that I'm missing, please let me know
https/www.dropbox.com/sh/4vu3l7yilig6qgi/AAAnJIiIx-_MTSugTQIm_P5ia?dl=0

Could you please take a look? I saved the pictures in dropbox of the bios screen.

Thank you!

 

[Karadjgne]

You have boot order right, it should boot the USB drive from #3 at least, maybe even #1.

 

[peppyto]

Hi,

That's the issue, it just goes directly to windows.
I can't have it boot from usb

 

[Karadjgne]

Can you burn a DVD? If so, try copy the USB to DVD and boot from that instead. If that fails (and i've never heard of a boot able DVD failing to boot) then the issue isn't one of the usb/DVD failing, it's one of the software/drive not being recognized as bootable. It might have windows on it, but it's not a bootable copy or the USB isn't formatted to be bootable.

 

[peppyto]

Ok thanks, i'll try with a different USB then

 

[Karadjgne]

When you format the usb make doubly sure you enable bootable, or the laptop will just see the drive as a storage device, it won't recognize it as an OS drive.

 

[peppyto]

FInally it worked, my usb formating was set on NTFS, changed it to FAT32 and that did the trick

 

[Karadjgne]

Sweet. Glad to hear that you found the answer.