Upgrade lost Win 10, GRUB and BIOS

[westie457]

Hi, I have absolutely no idea if this will work, possibly some of your partitions are slightly corrupted.
The following will take a long time to complete. Do not attempt to take any shortcuts.
How do you feel about attempting to rewrite the partition table?
Reading through this thread you are able to boot Ubuntu. Is that correct?
Boot into Ubuntu, open a terminal

sudo apt install testdisk
sudo testdisk

Accept the default suggestions as they appear on the screen. Keep going through 'Quick Search' and finally run 'Deeper Search' until it finishes and shows a complete list of partition info found on the hard drive.
Now open another terminal

sudo fdisk -l

Look through the testdisk list and any that match up with the list in 'fdisk' terminal change to a 'P',any that are duplicated take the newest one (this will be the lower in the list than the older ones}. The start points and end points must match exactly. When all partitions have been selected tab to 'Write' and hit Enter. Follow the prompts to Reboot.

Fingers, toes and everything else crossed you should be booting as you would normally.

[hans12345]

Hi, I have absolutely no idea if this will work, possibly some of your partitions are slightly corrupted.
The following will take a long time to complete. Do not attempt to take any shortcuts.
How do you feel about attempting to rewrite the partition table?
Reading through this thread you are able to boot Ubuntu. Is that correctly.

Thanks Westie

Yes, Ubuntu is working perfectly.

Just no banner screen on boot, no UEFI access, no Grub (and of course no Win 10).

I won't follow your idea for the moment, I still need to do a full backup.

The next step is to try to reset the UEFI BIOS.

Crossing my fingers ...

[hans12345]

I will delay the jumper change to reset the UEFI BIOS.

I think now that this is not a Grub problem, and probably the key aspect is the failure of the ACER banner page to start.

So I am going to post to the PC hardware forums.

Rest assured, if I make progress there I shall report here.

And if I get no good ideas there, I shall consider again the jumper change to reset the UEFI BIOS.

[oldfred]

If you jumper pins or remove coin battery on motherboard be sure to reset all the UEFI settings you changed.
With BIOS it always reset everything to defaults, now with UEFI, it has its own memory and will save some settings.

[hans12345]

Breakthrough!

I focussed on the video aspect of the problem.

I noticed that the ACER comes with a HDMI connector to the ACER monitor.

So I tried an old monitor which will support VGA.

It works. Now I have one black screen and one working VGA screen.

The ACER banner appears only on the VGA monitor. And I can boot from a DVD. (It happens to be memtest, which is the one I normally start with when I have a problem)

Now how do I get the banner page and grub on the HDMI monitor (which was working a short time ago)?

[oldfred]

Is that a setting in UEFI, on which video out to use? Or configuration of grub/Ubuntu.
Acer banner is before grub, so would be an UEFI setting.

[hans12345]

Breakthrough report #2:

Now I am back to a fairly normal problem (ignoring the HDMI monitor one for the moment) for this forum.

The ACER, using the VGA screen, now only boots into Win10. No grub, no Ubuntu.

BIOS / UEFI status
No secure boot (and I imagine no fastboot, but the option does not show, I suppose because I had already disable secure boot).
I had these 2 enabled in the BIOS, which I now have disabled:
- Quiet boot (I now get the POST messages)
- Deep Power Offf Mode - this could have been related to the earlier comment about the PC being in Windows hibernation.

So is it time for a boot-repair?

[hans12345]

Hi OldFred

Is that a setting in UEFI, on which video out to use? Or configuration of grub/Ubuntu.
Acer banner is before grub, so would be an UEFI setting.

There is no setting in the UEFI / BIOS setting as to which video to use.

The current sequence is Banner (or now, POST) screen, the straight to Windows.

[oldfred]

I know Acer has to have UEFI Secure boot on to let you enable "trust". Not sure what other settings having Secure Boot on or setting password then opens up.

My Asus motherboard has something called VT-D. But it says only if enabled, you then see graphic settings for primary display, audio, multi-monitor and others.
So often one setting may open lots of other settings. And UEFI Secure Boot can change all of that.

UEFI fast boot and Windows fast start up are two different settings. Did Windows updates turn fast start up back on.
Or UEFI updates turn fast boot back on. My system does that whenever I update UEFI.

[hans12345]

I know Acer has to have UEFI Secure boot on to let you enable "trust". Not sure what other settings having Secure Boot on or setting password then opens up.

My Asus motherboard has something called VT-D. But it says only if enabled, you then see graphic settings for primary display, audio, multi-monitor and others.
So often one setting may open lots of other settings. And UEFI Secure Boot can change all of that.

I had UEFI Secure boot turned off. I put it back on to look for the Fast boot option. I cannot find it anywhere in the BIOS. Secure boot is now again turned off.

UEFI fast boot and Windows fast start up are two different settings. Did Windows updates turn fast start up back on.
Or UEFI updates turn fast boot back on. My system does that whenever I update UEFI.

I looked and found that Windows fast start was on. So I switched it off. But no change.
I still boot (on the VGA monitor), with a banner screen, straight to Win 10. No grub.

Shall I try boot-repair now?