Restoring an Acer Aspire E1-571 laptop

[Mzee]

I have just completed the restoration of a Granddaughter's laptop. It has been well treated, but was on Windows 7. I replaced the HDD with a SSD, increased the RAM from 4GB to 8GB, and fitted a new battery. The only fault is one worn USB port, it has another two so not a problem. The screen is brilliant, far better than both my modern Lenovo & MSI laptops. I installed Windows 10 Pro v 22H2. Tried Windows 11 but had a driver problem.

An interesting situation occurred caused by fast boot being enabled. I tried to do a backup with Macrium, but no way could I boot from a USB. I couldn't even get into the BIOS, or Boot Menu. This would make it impossible to restore the system if it went pear shaped! I would have to remove the drive, and restore it with another computer. Can anyone suggest a work around for this situation. Of course fast boot was not around when the BIOS was written.
It Boots in 35 seconds without fast boot anyway.

[king1]

it is usually the uefi secure boot that prevent booting from USB devices, the macrium boot USB would need to support it, or in the bios you can turn off secure boot and enable legacy boot support. That will usually allow you to boot from USB sticks

an example
https://community.acer.com/en/discussion...s-settings

I think the F9 key at the Acer splash screen normally brings up the Acer boot device menu.

To get into the bios I believe it is f10 but you can also access it via the windows recovery environment
https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-nz...windows-10

[Mzee]

it is usually the uefi secure boot that prevent booting from USB devices, the macrium boot USB would need to support it, or in the bios you can turn off secure boot and enable legacy boot support.  That will usually allow you to boot from USB sticks

an example
https://community.acer.com/en/discussion...s-settings

I think the F9 key at the Acer splash screen normally brings up the Acer boot device menu.

To get into the bios I believe it is f10 but you can also access it via the windows recovery environment
https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-nz...windows-10

There is no mention of secure boot in the Bios.
This early Acer is Legacy only. When Windows fast start is enabled it will only load windows, nothing else! If the Windows won't boot you have no way of reinstalling from a backup. If fast start is disabled, you have access to everything, normal. Given this situation I would remove the hard drive and restore it with another computer. Maybe a BIOS update is required? I haven't bothered as it boots in 35 seconds without fast start.