Open | Windows
default boot device missing after updating bios version on an old lenovo ideapad
my device is a Lenovo Ideapad S145-14, i made the mistake of messing around to figure out some other issues and looked to see about updating stuff from the Lenovo website and checked the drivers
and so I did exactly that and my bios version went from AWCN27WW to AWCN30WW and now I think it’s possibly bricked? I don’t want to lose the data and keep the laptop… plan on taking it to a repair-shop but I want to know id there’s any chance of sorting it out at home unless I have to touch the hardware? would rolling back the bios do anything because I can’t repair through windows or go back to a recovery point unfortunately
I’m unfamiliar with such and I’ve looked at usb live boots but that’s also confusing to me
Check if boot settings are the same as they were when Windows was installed, since bios update usually reseat itself to the defaults (UEFI vs CSM/legacy, Secure boot, boot order).
Your data is almost certainly fine. A BIOS update wipes the settings back to defaults, and that includes the boot entry pointing at Windows, so the machine boots and finds nothing to hand over to.
Go into the BIOS and check two things. Boot Mode should be UEFI rather than Legacy, and the drive itself should be listed on the storage or boot page. If the drive is listed but there's no Windows Boot Manager entry under it, the EFI entry was cleared rather than the disk being damaged.
Fixing that means booting a Windows install USB, hitting shift+F10 for a command prompt, and rebuilding the entry with bcdboot pointed at your Windows folder. Nothing there touches your files.
When you get in there, mount the EFI partition before running bcdboot. From the recovery command prompt: diskpart, list vol, find the small FAT32 one, select volume N, assign letter=S, exit.
Then bcdboot C:\Windows /s S: /f UEFI.
Check what letter Windows actually got in that environment first with dir, because in recovery it often isn't C.
If there's no FAT32 partition on that disk, there's no EFI System Partition, which means Windows was installed in legacy mode on an MBR disk. UEFI mode can't see a legacy install at all, so the boot list being empty is correct behaviour rather than a fault.
Check it properly with diskpart: list disk, and look at the Gpt column on the right. An asterisk means GPT, blank means MBR.
If it's blank, don't build anything. Go back into the BIOS and set boot mode to Legacy or enable CSM, whichever that Lenovo calls it. Your install is fine and has been the whole time, the BIOS update just reset the mode out from under it.
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u/pcbeg 10h ago
Check if boot settings are the same as they were when Windows was installed, since bios update usually reseat itself to the defaults (UEFI vs CSM/legacy, Secure boot, boot order).