The ongoing battle with Win7 and my Acer

[carpefile]

I've been running Tiny7 on a couple boxes for months, smoothly and with no headaches (except for a bit of networking hassles with older windows machines).

I have an Acer Aspire M5640 that I house all my biz stuff on. It came with Vista Home Premium which I intended to wipe and run XP on, only to find out it was impossible to do, so we were stuck with Vista. I didn't want to run Tiny7 on it, because that meant wiping the drive and we have a lot of info and software on it that I didn't want to be bothered to back up and reinstall, so I waited till I could afford the legit 7 Ultimate dealio and upgrade.

Nightmare from hell.
Windows advisor said I was good to go, so I did.
After upgrading successfully, it wouldn't (and still won't) boot the sata hd. After POST it just goes to a black screen with blinking cursor at top left. Much much google searching yielded many possible fixes, none of which worked.
Repair console couldn't find a thing wrong with the install.
Hiren's got me in to a point where I frantically updated drivers and flashed the BIOS to the latest build. No dice.

Finally disconnected the sata drive and installed a clean, old ide drive and did a fresh install on it. Eureka! It works!
Sorta...

BIOS recognizes it, but for some unknown reason refuses to put it in the boot order. I can F12 and demand that it boots off it, and it will, but have to do it each boot.

Any ideas, oh sage ones?

[El Comandante]

Well ... maybe a bad configuration between IDE and Sata controllers in your bios and Windows 7?

Try: http://www.ariyako.org/2009/07/how-t...-installation/

[w31n3r]

El C got there first!!

same thing when trying to boot off a IDE optical drive when using SATA HDDs. both Nvidia (one of my boxes has your same 7100 chipset) and newer intel chipsets seem to like making PATA/SATA combinations a pain in the ass. nothing to do with your windows7 install though. the trick is to set your IDE config in bios to SATA+PATA. you'll have to look a bit under Advanced.

[carpefile]

Sounds very promising! I'll give it a try and let you know what happened. Thanks guys, I've been at the end of my rope hanging by a thread by my fingernails on this.

[carpefile]

No help so far. My BIOS doesn't seem to have an IDE config feature. There is one for sata, but it only sets between sata or raid configuration for sata drives. There is one bios update more recent than mine by a few days. It's a windows installer though, and I was accessing via dos at the time. I assumed the only difference between the 2 was the installer, but wth, now that I'm in Windows I have nothing to lose running the newer build.

[w31n3r]

carp, i think you have the nvidia 7100 chipset on which is the same one i have. mines by XFX so there may be differences though. if your's is an ami bios, check under Integrated Periphirals->On Chip ATA Devices->Raid Mode. change it to IDE or AHCI (Default is SATA). i keep it on IDE since i'm running XP on that box, but you need ahci if you want NCQ to kick in. i'd suggest IDE for a pain free solution :)

[Dark Messenger]

Hello brother (carpefile). I have an Acer Aspire 5532 pc that I bought new from bestbuy running windows 7 home premium.
Brother this is what I found in my bios by pressing 'F2' after reboot.
There is an option available on the 'Main' tab (in the Bios) that has a 'SATA Mode' setting which lets you choose between AHCI Mode or IDE mode. AHCI is the default mode. If you change this setting in the bios it will break the ability to load the default operating system. In your case Vista.
First thing you need to do is power down.
2) Put your original drive back in.
3) Change this setting in your bios back to 'AHCI Mode'.

Tell me what happens when you do this and we
ll go from there.

Now here's a little extra info for you.

One of the reason's you are having so much problems is because of two things:

A) Windows Vista (XP and 7) tries to use the entire partition that it is installed on for its self. It also doesn't recognise any other file systems other than its own.

B) With OEM providers and newer laptops like the Acers these are set up with a funny as in 'peculiar' type of setup which requires that the 'AHCI' mode be enabled in order for it to work right.

The reason for this is:

A) Acer (oems) have their own hidden partition on the hard disk drive (hdd) in which is stored the operating system its self and all installed or bundled programs.

B) A hidden boot partition.

C) The actual Vista files on its own partition.

The actual 'Vista files on its own partition' is what you as the 'user' are able to see and what you as the user would think of as the typical windows installation.

Here's what you may not have known. Vista/Windows 7 doesn't boot from this partition...it boots from the hidden partition which then tells it to load and run which ever version of windows you have installed whether it be Vista or Windows 7.

Okay I need to stop here with the information and make a statement.

Since you attempted to upgrade to Windows 7 its possible you may have messed something up regarding this boot order.

I don't want to scare you just yet...but the problem you are experiencing I have experienced myself on at least two different occassions...the first was from a corrupted windows profile, the second was from removing 'system' permissions from the Security tab on the windows folder...and I think that also changing the Bios mode from 'AHCI' to IDE also causes this.

For now go ahead and put your original drive back in (the sata one). Make sure you change the bios setting back to AHCI. and we'll go from there. Just tell me what you've got after you've done this...what happens or doesn't happen?