Unbranded Tablet AMI BIOS does not list boot options

Question

I recentyl purchased an Unbranded Tablet from ebay that had some licensing issues with Windows 8.1. My solution was to take an image from another unbranded tablet(exact same machine) and boot from that image. Unfortunately when I go into the BIOS I am unable to choose the USB as a boot option. Long story short I ended up wiping the Disk partition in hopes that with no other form of boot options it would see the USB device. This of course did not work.

After searching around it looks like I would need to enable the CSM, although I don't even have that option under the "Boot" menu in the Bios. I also saw posts that mentioned I should disable Secure boot. I have tried it both ways without much help. There were a few times that the usb was recognized but when I select that as the default boot option it would boot straight to the bios again. The only options I have available in the boot section are quiet boot and fast boot, again not the CSM.

Side note: on this tablet it has a micro usb and (on the keyboard that came with it) it also has a full USB. I have tried every possible combination of settings with the usb in both of the slots with no prevail.

Does anyone know how to either hack into the bios to see if there are any hidden options that I may be able to uncover/another way to force boot from another machine? Since this tablet does not have a physical HDD I could remove and attach to my computer i am not sure how this could be done? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Double side note: Yes, I have checked the image to make sure other computers recognize it. I actually loaded windows on another machine with the same usb that same day. I have also ensured that the usb is not corrupted many times. I really think the issue is in the Bios(cheap tablet).

Link to tablet description: (Yes, I also contacted unbranded support and it sucked. The guy obviously had no idea what I was talking about.)

http://www.unbrandedproducts.com/support

Thanks!

Answer 1

I made image with Macrium from an exact copy of the unbranded tablet. I have numerous of these tablets in both Win 8.1 (Bing) and several I upgraded to Win 10 years ago.

My particular tablet had issues after I tried to upgrade to win 10 lately, as all my drivers didn’t upgrade like they did years ago. Probably because windows doesn’t support upgrades for old Bing machines. Anyway no drivers meant no touchscreen, or sound, or windows screen button etc. I spent a long time trying to update drivers but things like touchscreens hardware would not even show up to add driver.

So It dawned on me to just image one of my working Win 10 unbranded tablets. I used Macrium Resolve Free and copied the image from the drive of one of the tablets currently running Win 10 onto an SD card and used used a cheap USB stick to load Macrium's bootable rescue USB, configured my image through restore in Macrium, and then booted the tablet and entered the restore sequence. The restore took over and in 20 minutes or so, my tablet was a mirror of the one that worked fine. It even activated since the activation code is on the motherboards bios. All worked well....problems all solved. Try it.