P150EM Bios / UEFI issue

I'm running into an issue when booting my laptop, and I was wondering if maybe anyone had any insight into it.

Basically, I had Windows 8 installed in UEFI mode, and everything was fine. Being a Linux guy, I decided to install Debian in UEFI mode and that worked fine.

However, Arch Linux is my main OS, so I decided to go ahead and install that, while in UEFI mode. This appears to have been a mistake. I didn't touch the Windows drive, but the Linux drive was the first in the boot order -- and now whenever I boot the computer, it goes straight to a grub rescue prompt, because I didn't properly install the grub UEFI in Arch Linux.

Now this in itself isn't such a big deal, normally I'd just boot back to windows and call it a day. However none of my F-keys are working -- I can't F2 to get to setup, or F7 to get to the boot menu, as I normally could. Whenever I turn on my computer it goes directly to the Grub recovery mode, with no other options available to me.

Does anyone have any experience with this? All paths to fixing this that I normally would take are thrown out the window due to the fact that I cannot boot to a removable drive.

Thanks!

 

Easy way to fix this.. Remove ALL your bootable drives, it'll dump you into the BIOS automatically when it can't find anything to boot to, then you can change the boot order or turn off UEFI booting for a moment so you can fix things up.. Thats the easiest way if you installed an OS that isn't quite UEFI boot ready

 

Thank you very much, I hadn't even thought of that. I'll give it a shot.

So I was able to get into the bios by doing as you said, removing all hard drives, and it turns out that I may have overwritten the Windows 8 boot record on accident. Woops! So I'll have to fix that.

But now I'm running into another issue. I've changed it back from Windows 8 (UEFI) to BIOS, and that's fine, and I've reconnected all drives. But now when I boot up via BIOS, and all drives are connected, the POST screen says "Resuming from Hibernation" and still, just as before, the F keys don't work, so I can't get to a boot menu. I remember this happening before, when I'd have gone into hibernation, and I had to boot into an OS and fully shut the thing down in order to get to the boot menu / setup.

Now this, in combination with the fact that I hosed my Windows 8 install, is making it impossible to boot anywhere else. Is there a way to clear the hibernation flag, or whatever it is, from the bios so it stops trying to resume from hibernation?

 

Best chance is to pull the CMOS battery and reset it to defaults and hopefully that clears the flag.. You can also try unceremoniously power cycling it right at post and that might clear the flag, but we don't really have a good way to get around that, its a pain when we get one in a loop like that too

 

I saw another of your posts re: P150HM, where the CMOS is under the keyboard -- is that the same for the P150EM as well?

Alrighty, got it fixed. Had to pull up the speaker grill, then unscrew the keyboard, lift it up, and disconnect the battery.

Had a bit of a harrowing moment there -- the battery is plugged into the motherboard via a black and red twisted cable. However, the plug *would not* come out -- so I gave it a tug and the leads themselves pulled right out of the plug. I was able to insert the leads back into the plug, very carefully, and it *looks* like the battery is still working, as I left the thing without AC or battery for about 10 minutes and it retained the date and time in the BIOS.

Thanks again for all the help on this!

 

It's a plug. There is always something to grip to ease a plug out in a computer.

 

On other models maybe the plug wasn't in so tight, however I tried with a screwdriver as well as my fingernail, and that just ended up breaking off a corner of the plug. That thing was in there, *damn* tight.