Fast boot and UEFI bricked my system

I recently installed a SSD in my NP880Z5E-X01UB and everything went swimmingly, the problem occurred when I tried to enable UEFI. I wanted to decrease my boot time so I enabled fast boot and deleted the UEFI keys so that I could do a system refresh to get the keys but when I selected "SAVE SETTINGS AND RESTART" it went to a black screen and no further. I proceded to wait ten minuites and when nothing happened I did a hard reset with the same outcome. I do believe that I messed something up pretty bad and this is my last ditch effort before I go to best buy and let them get their sticky fingers all over my otherwise super laptop. I guess my main question is if there is a way to somehow reset everyting so that I can at least get into BIOS and undo this or turn off fast boot without access to bios.

Thanks

 

Hi Frank, sorry to hear about that.

Try the a BIOS/CMOS reset: Unplug the power adapter; stick an unbent paper clip through the battery disconnect hole in in the bottom (if your model has one) till you hear a click (this should disconnect the battery); press and hold the power button for at least one minute; now re-connect the power adapter and see if you can boot into BIOS (F2).

If your model doesn't have a battery disconnect hole, you may have to open it and physically disconnect the battery.

You could also try and remove the SSD and swap in the original HDD and see if that helps. I think it may.

You said you enabled UEFI to decrease your boot time, is that correct? UEFI would have been enabled from the factory. Did you disable it earlier and manually install in non-UEFI mode when you got the SSD?

In any case should UEFI never be changed (enabled/disabled) on a running Windows installation: UEFI mode requires a GPT disk and an UEFI Windows installation, so disabling UEFI will render the system unbootable until the disk is converted to MBR and Windows is re-installed. Conversely, non-UEFI mode (Legacy BIOS/CSM mode) requires an MBR disk and a Legacy BIOS Windows installation, so enabling UEFI will also render the system unbootable until the disk is converted to GPT and Windows is re-installed.

Probably enabling Fast Boot at the same time was the death nail in this case, since changing UEFI caused the system to be unable to boot from the SSD, and enabling Fast Boot caused it to be unable to boot from USB or other devices.

I hope one of the above tricks will help. Please keep us posted...

 

I brought it to best buy and gave it to their "Geek Squad". I called them and I guess I had gotten free support when i got the pc so when they are done with it (3-5 days) hopefully they will have fixed it without formatting the hard drive but if they cannot fix it I will try this before letting them send it off to the chop shop that is the samsung service center.

P.s. Extreeeeemly thankful for the quick response!!

 

On second thought I believed that I had to disable UEFI to install from a flash drive since the laptop doesn't have a disk drive to install from. Is this not true? Did I really only have to disable quick boot?

 

Yes and no: You can, in fact, boot USB in UEFI mode simply by disabling Fast Boot. But UEFI does not support booting from NTFS drives, only from FAT32. Many people used Microsoft's old Win7 tool to write ISOs to a USB stick -- and it formats the USB stick as NTFS, making it unbootable in UEFI mode.

To my knowledge, Microsoft has not released an updated tool that creates a FAT32 USB stick -- which is puzzling to say the least. But there are other tools, such as Rufus and ISO2Disc, that should work.

Another way is to select OS Mode Selection=UEFI & CSM OS which will allow legacy MBR and NTFS drives to be booted. My concern with that, is that for a clean OS install, UEFI mode may not be correctly detected, so that Setup proceeds with a legacy BIOS/MBR installation instead of an UEFI/GPT installation.

For owners of models with ExpressCache (2011 and 2012 Series 7 and Series 5) installing from USB is even more troublesome beyond these boot issues, because Windows Setup gets confused by the small iSSD used by ExpressCache and installs its boot partition there. But since the iSSD isn't bootable, the system will fail on the first boot after copying files. There are workarounds in this post and the post immediately following. But if you have an optical drive, installing from DVD is so much easier, since it eliminates all these issues entirely.