I worked on an Acer Aspire 571p laptop that would not allow entry into the BIOS by pressing F2, or to the boot menu by pressing F12. My goal was to install an SSD and boot from USB to install Windows 10 completely clean. However, this particular laptop was unable to boot to USB and would only boot Windows. Entering the BIOS and turning on the F12 menu didn’t work. Adjusting the boot order so I could boot to my USB stick also didn’t work; The BIOS would just ignore me and continue to boot Windows. Updating the BIOS didn’t work. Using the Windows advanced boot menu to boot to USB also didn’t work; it would just continue to boot Windows.
Symptoms
- Unable to press F2 to enter BIOS
- Unable to press F12 to enter BIOS
- Unable to boot to USB stick by all conventional means
Solution
- Boot to Windows
- Select Restart while holding Shift key
- Use the recovery advanced boot menu to choose to boot the UEFI BIOS
- Within BIOS, Enable the F12 boot menu
- Save and Exit the BIOS
- Boot Windows again
- Select Restart while holding Shift key
- Use the recovery advanced boot menu to choose to boot to UEFI BIOS again
- At exactly this moment, tap F12 to access the boot menu before the BIOS loads. The keystrokes should work here, even though they didn’t work at power-on.
- If your USB stick doesn’t appear in the boot menu, use a different USB port and try again. In my case the one closest to the user worked.
- Buy me a coffee for saving you an enormous headache.
Explaination
My theory as to the nature of this problem is that the laptop ignores all keypresses when first powering up (firmware bug), and luckily by looping through Windows to go to the BIOS, the BIOS post occurs the exact same as it would if the laptop were powered on fresh, except the keyboard keypresses are functional after Windows has been loaded once.
Initially I thought it was a unique security feature, but because you can do a Shift+Restart without logging into Windows, there really is no security and this makes no sense. I suspect it is a bug or oversight with this line of Acer laptops.