I recently came across a misbehaving Acer Swift SF315 laptop and wanted to run some diagnostics tools from Ultimate Boot CD. UBCD requires BIOS / legacy boot mode, but no matter where I looked, there was no option to enable legacy boot mode on this laptop. On some Acer devices, this can be done after enabling the supervisor password in BIOS, but on this device, it only allowed to disable secure boot – legacy boot mode was still nowhere to be found.

After trying and failing with most of bootable hardware diagnostic tools, I found a few that worked. First one was Hiren’s BootCD PE. Only the latest version based on Windows 10 PE x64 worked. Older versions don’t support UEFI. Hiren’s BootCD allowed be to scan the hard drive using GSmartControl. There were other Hard Drive diagnostic utilities as well, but they could not detect the hard drive. Hiren’s BootCD PE doesn’t seem to include any RAM testing tools. To my rescue came MemTest86 which also supports UEFI. Both tools only worked when booted from a USB flash drive. An external DVD drive wasn’t able to boot anything at all.

July 2020
Acer Swift SF315-52