some misleading and incomplete info in a few of these replies. here are some important points that need clarifying.
* SSD stands for Solid State Drive. there are no mechanical movements in these hard drives. Even if they fail, there will never be any clicking sounds, vibrations. Think of it like how a usb flash drive works. they are fast! they tend to be included with higher end systems or as aftermarket upgrades.
* HDD stands for Hard Disk Drive. these are traditional hard drives with mechanical moving parts. Almost like a high-tech record player; there's a spinning platter that stores the data (the vinyl), and a read/write arm with a magnetic head that access the platter (not unlike the tonearm and cartridge-needle on a record player). More often than not, these are standard with many factory systems. and these make a noticeable sound when they are running (smooth high pitched whirling). if you hear clicking, then your HDD is more than likely toast.
* my Acer has the “no bootable device” error when booting up. With UEFI (and secure boot) enabled, my computer is ONLY looking for the operating system on the internal HDD (or SSD). it doesn't care if I have a windows repair CD, or USB recovery flash drive plugged in.
* Disabling UEFI and switching it to Legacy (which also disables secure boot) will allow me to tell the computer to look at other locations when booting up.
To do this on my Acer: (firstly, laptop has to be powered off).
# Press and hold F2, then power on laptop. keep holding F2 until the UEFI screen (aka BIOS) pops up.
# use arrow keys to navigate to the BOOT tab. Press <enter> on BOOT MODE. Change to LEGACY. (A pop up warning should appear. This is normal. just hit OK). Note that the SECURE BOOT option is no longer there! That's normal as secure boot is a feature available only with UEFI.
# use arrow keys and navigate to MAIN tab. Press <enter> on F12 BOOT MENU. Set this to ENABLED (may already be enabled for some of you).
# Press F10 to save and exit. System will now reboot using the old school CMOS/BIOS some of us are familiar with. this will give you options to boot from CD ROM, USB, Network etc. this is where a recovery usb or disc or windows installation disc will actually work.
# Press and hold F12 as the computer starts to boot. the boot manager should appear showing you all the different options on your system. if you have a USB flash drive, make sure that is plugged in before you reboot otherwise it may not show up in the boot manager. same with DVD or CD ROMS. make sure there's something in there before booting. if it doesn't show up or it wasn't plugged in, just try again by pressing and holding the power button for a few seconds to shut off the laptop. Press and hold F12, then turn on the laptop.
# now this is where I'm going to stop because depending on the media you have for recovery, the next steps will vary. Just follow the on-screen instructions for your specific recovery tool. so as previous posts have said, Acer has a recovery creation tool that ideally would have been used when the computer was working. back in the day when computer companies cared about us, they used to send computers with a restore CD or USB. but they don't care anymore. so if you are one of the few people if that had the presents of mind 2 use this tool when everything was hunky-dory, then I'm happy for you. for the 95% of us that didn't, well you could try calling ACER and they can mail you one I think (probably for a fee tho). from another computer (does not have to be an Acer) or you could google Microsoft Windows Media Creation Tool (sometimes referred to as MCT). this will allow you to select the operating system version and make a usb or burn a dvd with a bootable copy of windows. For most of you, this should help you repair your windows installation. For the minority of you (like me) this will determine, in no uncertain terms, that the problem was a hardware fault. (my HDD failed-even though there was no clicking sound, there are a lot of other things that may have gone wrong with it.) Replacing the hard drive with a new one, and repeating the steps using the usb I made with the MCT would have installed Windows on the new HDD. but I chose not to do this. see below.
# because I like to think of myself as “cool” I actually installed Ubuntu instead of Windows. (I guess I also have trust issues with Windows lol). basically instead of using the MCT to create a bootable Windows usb, i made an equivalent bootable usb of Linux—Ubuntu. same steps to repair the Windows installation allowed me to install Ubuntu.
# once everything is operational again, you just need to go back into the BIOS and reverse the changes previously made. Enable the UEFI option. make sure secure boot is also enabled. You could leave the F12 BOOT MENU enabled or disabled (it won't affect anything).
**an important thing to note is that Acer claims that there is a helpful repair partition for fixing problems with the operating system. while booting up, you're supposed to hold ALT + F10 to bring up this recovery tool. obviously since my hard drive was unreadable, this did not help me one iota. this might help a lot of you though … in the bios it should already be enabled. but if it isn't you'll find it in the same MAIN tab. look for the option called D2D recovery—disk to disk recovery. (I probably should have started this post with that eh lol). once it is enabled, hold down ALT + F10 then turn on the computer.
anyways, good luck y'all!
-nick