Mastodawn

Hey fedizens

We had a bit of a mare yesterday, as wife's brand new laptop (an Acer Aspire A16-61M (NX.JP0EK.005)), which she got as a gift from family during recent sales, decided to suddenly crash in an awful manner after only a month of usage.

The laptop crashed in Windows (Win 11 Home, 25H2 with all AI tools removed) with an error message of some kind, rebooted, and then reported "no bootable device".

We spent a huge chunk of the day researching the issue, trying various supposed fixes, and failing miserably

Our failure led to us having a neurospicy meltdown in the evening 😔 As such, we're asking for your advice on attempting to fix it ASAP for wife

Wife has raised a ticket with Acer in case they're able to help, but we're hoping folks here will suggest something other than wiping the drive and reinstalling an OS.

Things we tried included:

Verifying that the SSD itself still showed in the UEFI/BIOS.
Resetting the UEFI to default.
- We cannot change to the boot mode to Legacy then back to UEFI, as some generic-advice-giving folks have suggested in Acer forums and elsewhere.
Using Windows PE to access the command line tools, as well as variants based on it, like:
- Aomei Partition Assistant's bootable media.
- Hiren's BootCD PE x64 (v1.0.8).
Using Windows 11 installation media (from their latest media creation tool) to access the troubleshooting repair tools.

The efforts thus far have only changed the error from not "no bootable device" to immediate blue screen messages showing a failure a load and presenting options (function key options like startup repair etc.) which all fail to work.

The main C: partition appears to be borked, and shows as unallocated.

We've tried to recover the partitions and the data, as well as clone the drive sector by sector, without success. As far as we know, Bitlocker hadn't been enabled, but one attempt to recover files under a tool within Hiren's BootCD PE asked for a pin when trying to recover files from the lost partition showing as unallocated space, so it may well be hindering any recovery efforts.

Due to life struggles, neither wife nor us had had the time to set up any backup services yet, and whilst most things are cloud saved and can be recovered, some files and all the custom settings and tools would be lost if we cannot recover the drive fully 😔

Apologies in advance if we advise we've tried something already, and please be kind and detailed with any comments or queries.

For context, we've 20+ years of troubleshooting Windows and hardware issues, but we're neither a programmer nor IT specialist of any kind, and have never had an IT-type job.

Any thoughtful ideas, suggestions, and recommendations will be most welcome 🩷

#AskFedi #TechSupport #Windows #Windows11 #GenuinelyAsking #NoReplyGuysPlease #troubleshooting #DataRecovery #DriveRecovery #Acer #NoBootableDevice

Update: After further troubleshooting, the issue appears to be that some crash broke the drive's partition table, and software couldn't recover all the partitions because BitLocker was enabled by default 🤦‍♀️ Fortunately wife was using her Microsoft account and the recovery key auto-synced to her account. Now just trying to find a bit of software other than DiskGenius (which is bleeping expensive) which can accept the BitLocker recovery key and rebuild the drive without having to back it up and restore it.

Further update: After a few days of working on this whenever we could around other things, and learning more about WindowsPE, WindowsRE, device encryption being enabled by default, bcdedit, manage-bcd, repair-bcd, bcdboot, various shite recovery tools that everybody claims are great but aren't at all, we finally ended up getting the device back into a semi-working state and told it to hold off on updates for the next 20 years. In the meantime, wife can use laptop again at least and we can fix the many other bugs again manually, via an in-place install, or properly backing up, nuking everything, and starting from scratch. On the plus side, we discovered that Rufus (the formatting tool) has options to download and customise Windows installations, including automatic disabling device encryption. Also had to play around a little with Linux Mint. We could get used to that, but we'd to find equivalents for WIndows mods and functions we're used to. Oh, and having to decrypt an encrypted unallocated (raw) partition, even where you have the recovery key, is one of the most cursed problems we've ever come across! Windows will allow you to assign a drive letter without formatting, but you can only decrypt it to elsewhere then: not in-place. Most recovery tools simply lack the simple ability to let you enter a recovery key or password and restore it in place.