I have a PackardBell EasyNote TV43CM that has booted up fine up until now. Most of the time the firmware says that it failed to boot up from either the hard drive or the DVD drive but once in a while I do get a windows boot and then it says that windows did not shut down properly last time and gives the usual options to fix that but all of them fail and reboots the machine and then back to the same loop of failing to boot up from the drives.
Looking in the firmware (InsydeH20 rev 3.7) I see that it is UEFI boot only, doesn't offer me to enable legacy boot or anything of the sort, when I go into the boot tab of the firmware all I can do is rearrange the boot order, nothing else. I have also tried to boot from USB that contains both legacy and UEFI booting mechanism and only the UEFI boots.
Looking at the hard drive I see 3 partitions, here is the output from fdisk -l
sudo fdisk -l /dev/sdf
Disk /dev/sdf: 698.7 GiB, 750156374016 bytes, 1465149168 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0xeedf850d
Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sdf1 2048 37750783 37748736 18G 27 Hidden NTFS WinRE
/dev/sdf2 * 37750784 37955583 204800 100M 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sdf3 37955584 1465145343 1427189760 680.6G 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
Too my understanding then the EFI system partition should be a Fat32 partition, there is no such partition. Looking inside these partitions then in the first partition I see the following content:
100_CR.DAT D2D ImageInfo.dat RCD.DAT SYSTEMCD.DAT
ACERBOOT EFI LPCD.dat Restore.dat System Volume Information
BOOT FACTORY Napp7.log RyTools
BOOTMGR Flag.log NAPP.DAT SOURCES
With the following as directories: ACERBOOT, BOOT, D2D, EFI, FACTORY, RyTools, SOURCES, System Volume Information
In the second partition I see the following:
Boot bootmgr Recovery $RECYCLE.BIN System Volume Information Temp
With all of them being directories except bootmgr
The third partition contains Windows.
So I am wondering how is this machine supposed to be able to boot? It can only boot UEFI, but doesn't have a Fat32 partition with the EFI directory in it, and the disk has the MBR partition scheme, not GPT.
The computer has Win7 on it and I have tried to boot of both Win7 and Win10 installations disks and tried to fix the bootup but both fail, the Win7 says it is not compatible (I guess it tries to fix a MBR boot) and the Win10 just says it failed.
Any ideas on how to make this machine boot again without reinstalling the OS?
