I had exactly the same problem. Thank God I eventually solved it. Mine gave me a really tough time because I had formatted the HDD so I could not boot into windows to change the startup settings. I plugged the drive into another Acer laptop and tried installing the OS, which was successful but another problem showed up when I fixed it on my Acer - "operating system not found". Luckily for me my Acer could boot the HDD of the other Acer laptop, which already had windows 8 on it. I boot into windows, clicked on "restart" while holding "shift" and bingo! It gave me the menu where I could select UEFI startup. I hope you find this a lil helpful. Cheers...