Acer Machine Bios Update Stops Windows From Booting normally

Acer BIOS version R01-B1 has a bug where when you update the machine, Windows 11 will boot in safe mode because it cannot find the hard disk.

The root cause of the problem is that, the BIOS update changes the storage driver to VMD which Windows 11 doesn’t seem to support natively, at least as of this writing.

The solution is to hit DEL to go to BIOS –> Advanced –> Storage Configuration and disable VMD Controller. Restart the machine and it should boot normally.

Acer will probably fix this in another BIOS update but until then, this is the easiest fix. Otherwise, the driver for Intel RST VMD needs to be injected.

The above solution worked on Aspire TC-1760 with Win Home Premium Build 26100. The BIOS release date is 10/27/2022.

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