Solved Stange Issue with uEFI and Bios on Acer AO756 Netbook

[alphanumeric]

You might want to tone down the attitude.

I noticed on my Wife's Acer Laptop that the UEFI Firmware Settings option is missing from the Troubleshoot > Advanced Options screen in Windows 8. Disk Management shows a EFI partition though. I'm not sure what's up with that. "Windows Boot Manager" is listed as no.1 in the Boot Priority Order and "HDD ST500L is no 2. On her BIOS Boot screen, above the Boot Priority Order listing is Boot Mode [UEFI] and Secure Boot [Enabled]. I see from your screen shots that those two options are missing on your PC. I have no idea why though. My ASUS laptop that is UEFI also lists "Windows Boot Manager" as the first option in the Boot list.

 

[Missy Vixen]

Just following up with an update for anyone encountering the same weird issues as i was.
Thinking about how my mac would fail to start up from external devices sometimes, i remembered that purging the NV ram would sometimes fix things, i looked for how to do that with an acer laptop.

Bridging the CMOS reset would not flush items from the NVram.
Flashing new bios apparently does not clear it either, it only writes to the EPROM (odd, id thought it would flush out the nvram as well, just to get rid of any configs and start anew)

According to acer you can clear the NVram with the following steps :
Disconnect the A/C power > Remove the Battery > then press and hold the power key for 1-2 minutes to drain all power from any capacitors still holding a charge (and thus clearing the NVram (isnt it then still volatile if you clear it by removing power?) )

After that i was finally able to boot off my windows 7 DVD and the flash drive i had made as well.
An elegantly simple solution to a rather frustrating issue.

Apparently windows 8 writes the uefi stuff to the NV ram?
Im still not sure what happened, or why it was causing so much trouble, or how it even functioned. But hopefully it either happens to no one else, or that if it does, this helps someone