1# Acer Switch Alpha 12
2
3WARNING:  These are directions to configure the machine and boot an experimental, in-development OS on it.
4
5## Powering the Machine On
6To power on you must hold the power button (lefthand side, above the Volume rocker) for several seconds, then let go.  You can safely let go when the tiny blue light on the power button itself turns on (yes, this is really hard to see when you’re holding the power button), or when the display backlight turns on.  If you hold too long it may end up power right back off again.
7
8## Powering the Machine Off
9If you boot into Windows 10 or something hangs or crashes and you need to power things off, Press and Hold the power button until the display shuts off.  To be sure, hold for about 10 seconds total.
10
11## Entering the BIOS
12With the machine off, Press and hold Volume Up, then continue to hold while pressing and holding the Power button.  Let go of the Power button when the display backlight turns on.  Alternatively, hold F2 on an attached keyboard while powering the machine on.
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14## Enabling Zircon Boot
151. Boot the machine and enter the BIOS
162. Select “Security” from the tabs at the left
173. Tap the “[clean]” gray bar under “Supervisor Password Is”
184. Enter a supervisor password, enter it again, press OK
195. Select “Boot” from the tabs at the left
206. Tap the “[Enabled]” gray bar under “Secure Boot”
21    (if there’s no gray bar, you have not set a supervisor password, go back and do that now)
227. Select “Disabled” from the menu
238. The “Boot priority order” list may be adjusted using the up/down arrows to the right of each item
249. Order the list like so:
25- USB HDD
26- USB FDD
27- USB CDROM
28- HDD: <MFG> <SERIALNO>
29- Network Boot-IPV4
30- Network Boot-IPV6
31- Windows Boot Manager
3210. Select the “Main” tab on the left and set the time and date by pressing “[SetTime]” and “[SetDate]” buttons respectfully. This is necessary for proper network operation.
3311. (Optional)  Go back to the “Security” tab and set the supervisor password back to nothing.
34Otherwise you’ll need to enter the password every time you use the BIOS.
35A password is required to modify the secure boot setting, but “disabled” will persist without one.
3612. Select “Exit” from the tabs at the left
3713. Select “Exit Saving Changes”
3814. Continue to [Setup with USB flash drive](usb_setup.md)
39
40## What if you end up in the Windows 10 Setup?
41If you don’t enter the BIOS and haven’t installed another OS, You’ll end up on a blue background “Hi there” screen asking you to select country, language, etc.
42
431. Press Power and Hold it for about 10 seconds (the screen will turn off after 2-3 seconds).
442. Boot into the BIOS as described above.
45
46## What if you get stuck in Windows 10 Recovery?
47It’s possible to end up in a situation where the machine *really* wants to help you recover your failed boots into Windows 10 and dumps you into a recovery screen -- blue background, “Recovery” in the upper left, and some text saying “It looks like Windows didn’t load correctly”.
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491. Select “See advanced repair options”
502. Select “Troubleshoot” (screwdriver and wrench icon)
513. Select “Advanced options” (checkmarks and lines icon)
524. Select “UEFI Firmware Settings” (integrated circuit and gear icon)
535. When prompted “Restart to change UEFI firmware settings”, select “Restart”
546. The machine should now reboot into the BIOS
557. Check that “Windows Boot Manager” didn’t get moved to the top of the boot order, fix it if it did
56
57## Quirks
58It has been observed that USB initialization is racy on a cold boot.  So if you're starting from a cold boot and trying to boot to USB, you may find that you boot to disk instead.
59
60Mitigations:
61- It's useful to use a `cmdline` file to set `zircon.nodename=foo` to know during the boot screen whether you're booting from USB or disk.
62- If the Acer is booting from disk and you want to boot from USB, remove and reinsert the USB drive, then reboot with `ctrl-alt-del` (not the power button.)
63- You can tell from the bios whether USB has been initialized because it will name the USB device.
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