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When visiting my in-laws I replaced their old computer with an AM07 and transferred all the data.

Everything worked, but now less than a month later their pc is stuck booting to the bios.

They’re in another country, don’t speak English, are not computer people, and live fairly remote so I can only provide support over video calls with simple instructions.

This is probably the worst possible scenario.

1. How can we back up the data on the pc?
2. Are there things they can try that are very simple instructions? Just getting them to navigate the bios is a pain, so no chance of any complex solutions.
3. I only visit them once a year max… so the next time I’ll be able to help in person is next year. What can we do until then?

Oh, I do have rdp installed and configured, so if they can get past the bios and into windows I could run a backup remotely. Any ideas?

The first thing I would have them try is resetting the BIOS to default settings. If nothing's been changed, it may not help, but it's a fairly easy thing to do, so it's worth a try. I don't have an AM07 to go by, but I believe the keys to use once in the BIOS are F3 to restore the defaults, then F4 to Save and Exit.

If that doesn't help, I'd recommend trying to reseat the storage, but being that they're not computer savvy, that's probably not possible, especially since the unit would have to be somewhat disassembled.

The next step I'd recommend is to try reinstalling the system. This will wipe out any data on the drive, so if there's a way to get any needed data off the drive first, it'd be best to do that, though I have no clue how that can be done without being in Windows.

Thanks I’ll walk them through resetting the bios over the weekend.

Can’t we tell if storage is properly connected via the bios? Does anyone have a screenshot of what the regular bios did boot screen is?

I am sure they wouldn’t be able to reseat storage or do a system install.

I could have them ship the pc to me, but looks like that’s $99 one way, $200 round trip. Which would be 50% of the cost…

If resetting the bios doesn’t work who should I contact at acemagic?

ibash,

You can have them look in the Boot section of the BIOS to see if anything shows in "Boot Option #1", like in the following...


It won't look exactly like that, as I've changed the drive in my AM06 Pro, but it should show something if the drive is being detected. If nothing's showing, they can move down to that "Boot Option #1" using the arrow keys and press Enter to see if the popup shows them the drive. If it does, they can select it, then press F4 to Save and Exit the BIOS.

You can contact barry directly at barry@minipcunion.com. He's a tech for the company.

Thanks! Will take a look this weekend. Opted to do an amazon defective item return since there's no point in spending more money to get it repaired.

Now the biggest concern is if there's a way to ensure the hard drive is formatted, amazon customer support says they do, but who knows what really happens to it...

I don't blame you for wanting to send it back, especially given the situation.

Your situation may be different but when this happened to me it turned out the NVME SSD crashed/malfunctioned and the computer was not able to boot from it.

1. Reference: How to fix booting into BIOS directly



2. Create and enter the PE system, click this computer under the PE system to find data backup;
PE file:

https://mega.nz/file/gn0mkSTT#FXZUx9m6c ... PQS1S9q5Yk

Tutorial on installing PE system:



3. Remove the built-in SSD and install it on another PC to read and backup it.