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    Cannot access BIOS on Series 7 NP700Z5C

    Discussion in 'Samsung' started by shinigamibob, Jan 2, 2013.

  1. shinigamibob

    shinigamibob Notebook Enthusiast

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    I've spent hours on this, but no matter what I press during startup, I cannot access the bios menu. I've tried Esc, F2, and F4. No matter what I press, it just keeps going to the Windows startup menu. The only change I've done is swapped the hard drive for a SSD, and I did try putting the original hard drive back in to see if that'd help any. It didn't. It makes no difference which drive is plugged in as neither allows me to access the bios.

    Reason I want to access the bios is to change the mode from UEFI to the normal BIOS because Easy Settings doesn't work - it just causes the laptop to freeze as soon as I run it. I've tried to update the bios via my old install, but since there is no newer version, it wont let me overwrite the current version.

    Any help would be greatly appreciated.

    EDIT: I did have windows 8 on the old drive and I'm wondering if its fancy new way of managing the UEFI might've caused this. That said, I dont recall seeing an option in the troubleshooting menu to access the UEFI.
     
    shinigamibob, Jan 2, 2013
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  2. banana19

    banana19 Notebook Enthusiast

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    have you tried it without the hard drive in it? my series 3 had the same issue. if it could not find a efi partitian it would revert back to a regular bios (would act like its restarting again) then you could press f2 to access the bios
     
    banana19, Jan 2, 2013
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  3. shinigamibob

    shinigamibob Notebook Enthusiast

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    I did. I managed to successfully get into the BIOS and disable the EFI mode. The problem still persists once I plug the SSD back in. F2 and Esc both don't work. Windows works just fine though, with the exception of Easy Settings. I cannot get that to work for the life of me. I've installed that and Easy Display Manager, but I keep getting a "Driver_not_installed" error message. :confused:
     
    shinigamibob, Jan 2, 2013
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  4. banana19

    banana19 Notebook Enthusiast

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    my first guess is that the ssd is still configured for secureboot. if you look at it with disk management does it have 2 partions or 3?
     
    banana19, Jan 3, 2013
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  5. shinigamibob

    shinigamibob Notebook Enthusiast

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    Its just two partitions - the main partition and the 100MB system partition. It doesn't have the 350MB EFI partition.

    I thought the system installed configured for GPT and EFI, but I guess all the mucking around in the command line somehow forced it to install MBR - but I think it was configured for EFI and not BIOS.
     
    shinigamibob, Jan 3, 2013
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