Windows Vista Acer states "known issue" affects installing XP on Vista drive. Huh?

I've been trying to get some information out of Acer regarding why I can't wipe an Acer (laptop) preinstall of Vista and replace it with XP.

The drive appears to clean up OK (with WipeDrive Pro) and accept the XP install (including Acer's SATA controller drivers at the F6 point) but, at the finish, XP won't run. Wiping the drive again and reinstalling Vista works.

Acer appear to be reluctant to tell my why this is so, but now tell me that:

They go on to say:

Hmm. Durned if I can find anything relevant. Anyone able to comment on this?

 

Hi Masonite,

Is/was there a hidden partition?

Did you try formating using XP's cd?

Some ideas:

Try creating a new partition and install XP on that and use C as a data partition. From there, if you don't want to leave it like that, maybe clone the XP partition and restore to C. Keep in mind the Boot.ini will be on C.

Get a new drive

BTW, this is a Dell issue as well on their laptops, seems there is a great reluctance to allow easy reversion to XP.

 

Thanks guys.

Charlesvar: There WAS a hidden partition but after running WipeDisk Pro, it vanished. However, I ran WipeDisk with only one pass, so maybe it should have been done with multiple passes to achieve a 'cleaner' wipe.

And YES, I formatted the drive using the XP cd, and the install seemed to go normally after that, right up until the first boot, when it wouldn't go any further.

Actually, it proved to be so much of a hassle that I finally gave up and reinstalled Vista.

Arie: Thanks for the link - it looks like that is the Microsoft information to which Acer was referring. It seems pretty informative; I'll archive it in case I'm tempted to try a similar project again

 

If you completely zero filled at least the first few MB of the drive then you will have wiped the MBR and partition table (and the extra Acer partition table) and so should have got rid of everything that could cause a problem. If you then created the new partition with the XP CD then it should have worked ok.

Did you get any error messages? I have heard of some new Vista machines where the motherboard’s bios is not XP compatible, but don’t know if this applies to your Acer.

 

thats really odd. I just did & it worked for me perfectly... WinXP is up & running.... on original C drive. maybe it depends on the make? not sure....

 

McTavish - on the first few tries, I DID get the error message that, on first XP boot there were no drives to be found.

I finally overcame this by installing SATA hdd controllers when the F6 prompt asks for SCSI, etc stuff.

But after I added those files the install seemed to be glitchless. Until the first XP boot when zip happened :-(

Now, this laptop DID have Vista basic to begin with and its BIOS is, according to an Acer website, a Vista BIOS (v.1.07).

On this site is also to be found an XP BIOS (v.1.02)

But according to Acer, who have reluctantly parted with a few driblets of info, installing the XP BIOS to the laptop (which I haven't done, as there's a limit to the amount of screwing-up that I'm prepared to go to with this customer's laptop. I mean, fooling with the drive is one thing; fouling up the BIOS can be a little more fatal) wouldn't have made any difference.

So I dunno :-(

Personally, I suspect a conspiracy, LOL, cooked up by Mr.Gates and his bedmate Mr.Acer (and Mr.Dell, and Mr. Compaq and Mr.Benq etc etc) which deliberately thwarts the efforts of anyone who has the temerity to dump a perfectly inadequate OS for something that works.

I made the comment in another WinBBS thread that it's a shame we can't buy laptops with no OS at all, so we could add our own. Arie kindly replied that Dell indeed do this; ie construct empty laptops, but if they do, they're concealing it well. I even emailed Dell and posed this question, but I've had no reply from this normally marketing-mad organization.

Mel: Dunno how you managed to do the job, but congratulations - you've struck a blow for freedom. Was it on a laptop? With an IDE drive? Or a SATA drive?

 

Hi masonite,

FYI: Velocity Micro has an XP Pro option.

http://www.velocitymicro.com/category.php?cid=3

Microsoft's financial long term interest is in Vista - not XP, so not suprising that MS will make deals with OEM's that result in these kind of situations.

That's one factor, another is maintenace of the OS and software by the OEM during the life of the initial maintenance agreement. Much easier to maintian a single OS and its compatable software.

 

Thanks Charlesvar. But I couldn't get your link to work. Just offline, perhaps?

 

Hi masonite,

Works for me.

Ok, try the main page and navigate from there. http://www.velocitymicro.com/index.php

Or just google VM.

 

Dunno what's happening here but I keep getting:
"You are not authorized to view this page "

I get it when I follow your link in FFox, IE6 and Opera.

Doing a Google search gets lots of hits and when I follow the Google links I get....... "You are not authorized to view this page "

Must be Secret-Squirrel stuff? ;-0

 

Hi masonite,

For a start, take a look at the Firewall settings.

 

Well a hang with no error message tells us something. My first guess would be that ntldr is looking for and can’t find the correct hard drive as listed in the boot.ini file, possibly because the bios settings for the first boot hard drive are not quite correct.

As you can reinstall Vista ok it tells us that after POST the bios is correctly finding the hard drive and able to start the boot sequence, beginning with the MBR. With Vista it is bootmgr that will take over and start Windows, and it does this without having to use the bios again to find the correct hard drive. With XP on the other hand, once ntldr takes over it has to use the bios to identify the hard drive from the number it was told to look for by the boot.ini file.

Check the bios boot options and make sure the sata drive is indeed the first boot hard drive. It way well be that an IDE channel is still set as first boot, which both your bios and Vista can work around, but not XP. During early install of XP you have the sata drivers installed in the Pre-install Environment so XP correctly recognises there is no IDE drive attached and accepts the sata as first boot hard drive. At first reboot the ntldr kicks in before the sata drivers as so defaults to what ever the bios lists as first boot hard drive.

Also, one other thing that I’ve seen with XP and sata is that during setup the partition might not get marked as active, which causes problems at the first reboot, although this will usually give an error message, but worth checking perhaps.

 

McTavish: Thanks for that added information; it fills in a lot of blanks about boot processes. As I said, I gave up and reinstalled Blista, but I'll have a squiz at the BIOS and see if I can make any sense out of it. I did have a look when I was wrestling with it, but it's a proprietary BIOS and doesn't allow the sort of detailed analysis that are obtainable with more transparent versions. Unless you know of a magic key like Ctrl\F1 that expands a lot of the simple motherboard BIOSes?

Charlesvar:I don't think it's a firewall issue, Charles. I have two laptops and four desktop pcs, all of which get the same message about "Acess denied ".

Four of the six pcs are running Zone Alarm Pro, the two workshop machines have none (I wouldn't use Windows firewall on a bet).

But I've just tried again and the error message has some additional information, and I quote:

"HTTP 403.6 - Forbidden: IP address rejected
Internet Information Services

Technical Information (for support personnel)

* Background:
This error is caused when the server has a list of IP addresses that are not allowed to access the site, and the IP address you are using is in this list "

So, not sure why this is so, but it's never happened to me before.

 

Hi McTavish. Just checked out the Acer Extensa 5210's BIOS and I'm surprised to report that the BIOS is recognizing the SATA drive as an IDE. The drive is correctly ID'd as an Hitachi, and it shows its serial no, but it's referred to as "IDE0 ".

Also, there's a boot screen that flashes momentarily, so I hit Pause\Break and checked it out.

It says:
Booting GRLDR.
Reseting (sic) Boot Drive - Success
Turning on Gate A20 - Success
This is followed by about 3 full lines of info about hdds, int13 etc etc then a "Vista LDR" kicks in with more information. I haven't managed to grab that info so far, as my reflexes aren't quite fast enough

 

Normally I’d say that GRLDR was the Grub Loader - the Linux boot loader. Did you use some Linux tool on the machine, or did you only wipe the partitions with WipeDrive Pro and not the MBR? If so it could be a part of the Acer OS recovery system, which would have been in the MBR. Or perhaps it is in the Bios of the machine, but that would surprise me, but not as much as if it were a part of Vista.

Don’t know what’s going on Masonite. My first thoughts would be that something of the Acer recovery system survived WipeDrive. I did have a look at an Acer laptop a month or so ago but could not mess with it, but I saw enough to see that there is a second partition table that seems to be the one that matters. The original being bypassed and unused, so any changes made to it with a third party tool would probably have no effect. However, installing Vista or XP should over-write the Acer bootcode in the MBR and replace it with the Windows bootcode, which would only use the conventional partition table.............

 

TonyT - Thanks for the Dell links.

McTavish - No, I didn't use any other tool than WipeDrive Pro, and that was with just one pass. It's a bit of a mystery, isn't it? However, the Vista Ultimate install seems to be working OK, so the thing is functioning.

Something I forgot to say here (I originally posted this query in another area of WinBBS) was that one of the first things I tried was to remove the hard drive from the laptop and mount it into one of my workshop desktop machines. This desktop pc has a Gigabyte motherboard that's about three years old, but has SATA connections built-in. It also has a floppy drive, which is necessary to load the SATA controllers (according to the Acer site where I got the files), which the Acer Extensa 5210 lacks.

I mounted the drive, wiped it with WipeDrive, then installed XP, adding the controllers at the F6 point. On completion, XP ran without a hitch, booting several times without incident. However, when I replaced it into the laptop it refused to boot.

Which was when I repeated the process, after first buying a USB floppy drive to insert the SATA controllers, but as I've described earlier, the XP install process appeared to work but wouldn't complete.

I must say it's been an interesting experience, but not one I'd recommend to anyone with a short fuse or a blood pressure problem

 

Then we're down to the BIOS or MOBO.

I've run across this issue with Dells. Some suggesting it's the hard drive and laying out a scenerio much the same as McTavish has, others the MOBO/BIOS and suggesting that in a system of recent manufacture (after January 30th, 2007) this is what happens if an XP install attempted.

For the record, I dual boot XP/Vista on an HP laptop. I ordered the system in late 2006 with the arrival date prior to 01/30 (January 10th as it turned out) to make sure that XP was installed knowing I would add Vista. Obviously, the HP MOBO and BIOS can run both. If I'd get a system from HP now, I don't know whether that would still be the case.

The "known issue" from your title is Acer making it hard if not impossible to revert the system to XP.

 

Thanks Charles.

Just got a another minimal reply from Acer Europe, (UK), which outfit I've been pestering for more information about the "known issue" that they quoted earlier, seeing as how it's their site that hosts the 'Extensa 5210' XP files that I used.

But they've obviously had enough of my wheedling and suggested that I call my local Acer Service Center. Yeah, well, went down that track at the beginning of this project and Acer Australia didn't want to know, either. (I'm in New Zealand so I have to shout loudly)

I wish I'd had a little more time to fool around with this thing, plus a few hundred bucks to buy some spare hdds to experiment on, as I would have liked to have found out exactly what was happening.

But the laptop has gone back to its owner now, so it'll have to wait 'til next time.

Hopefully, someone else might get enough info from these threads to help them take control of their own system.