Entering BIOS on NP8130

I'm trying to prep my Sager NP8130 for sale and I can't seem to get the system to go into the BIOS. I recently installed a 7,200RPM 1TB SATA III HDD so that's unformated. When the POST splash screen comes up it says to press F2 to enter setup or F7 for a boot menu and neither keys respond. I even tried hooking up my external keyboard to the system. The caps lock LED responds when I press that button so I know the keyboard is giving input. This worked fine before pulling the old drive and putting in the new one, so I doubt there is any hardware failure anywhere. The POST screen sits for 5 seconds and then it starts polling the NIC for a network boot because that's the only bootable device on the system.

I just want to get into the BIOS to reset to defaults and take a picture so potential buyers can see a working screen and the BIOS reported components.

 

You may not be pushing it soon enough. Start spamming F2 from the moment you hit power, dont wait for the screen to indicate it.

 

Tried it several times. No difference though. I can boot to a bootable flash drive and the keyboard is completely responsive then, but not during the post.

 

I dont have a Sager in front of me right now, and I know its telling you F2, but try pressing delete.

 

Earlier in the evening I chatted with Eric at xotic on your website. He had me try that too. It didn't work. The on-screen options are F2 and F7. I sent an email to service at xoticpc dot c0m at Eric's request with my serial number to have you guys ask sager for the latest BIOS. This is the stock BIOS. I also tried booting to UBCD on a thumb drive and clear the BIOS to the default settings and it said that it did it but no change. I'm not convinced it did it. While I'm waiting I'm thinking about installing a portable version of Windows 8 on my thumb drive and booting to the portable version to have it reboot directly to the BIOS. I don't think the NP8130 had a UEFI mode option but maybe it did.

 

OK, I think I resolved it without needing to flash the latest BIOS. What I did was to create a Recovery USB drive on Windows 8.1 (my new machine) and then use it on my old machine. I followed the recovery options to the advanced troubleshooting. The screen flashed black then restarted. On restart I was able to press F2 to enter the BIOS. I then reinstalled all of my hardware after shutting the system down and then restarted the machine and it was again able to enter the BIOS. As I suspected there was no UEFI mode setting in the BIOS so it is either automatic setting or it didn't exist on the NP8130.

 

Thanks for the follow up on how you fixed it. It may help someone else down the road.