Acer Aspire M5641 crashed

Hi all! I am trying to repair an Acer Aspire M5641 for a friend after the hard drive crashed. I formatted the hard drive and now it seems that the motherboard doesn't see it. I took the hard drive out and put in another computer. I was able to install xP and then Vista on the hard drive without issue. After I put the drive back in the original computer, it won't boot up. It seems to be looking for the hard drive. It is almost as if the drivers for the hard drive are not there. Vista comes up and asks for the setup info for the drive. I downloaded them from Acer's website and put them on a thumb drive, but it still won't work. I have checked all of the cables, and they are secure. Please help!!! Thanks!!!!!!

 

What exactly does the screen say when you try to boot from the HD in the Acer? Is it BIOS or Vista that is asking about the HD?

What happens when you try to install Vista on the HD from the Acer?

 

I will update the thread when I get back home. I can't remember the exact message. Thanks so much!

 

Ok. It is important to figure out whether it is Vista of BIOS that is having a problem recognizing the drive.

Vista shouldn't have a problem finding a SATA HD as long as the BIOS sees the drive. If BIOS doesn't see the drive then it could be a bad cable since the drive itself seems to work in another computer.

 

Sorry for the delay, but the computer goes into a continuous reboot. When it gets to the screen that says Microsoft Corporation with the green bar, it won't finish. It goes back to the screen that says Windows did not start properly on the last attempt, and says it could be a hardware problem. We think that the drivers for the SATA controller are not loaded, but we are not sure. How can we load the SATA controller drivers?

 

I'm not sure. I know XP won't allow you to install on one computer and then move the HD over to another. It won't correct the drivers. I don't think Vista will either.

I think you have to install Vista on the computer you will be using it on. With the HD in the Acer and starting the installation CD, if you choose install at what point do you have a problem with the HD not being recognized?

 

Ok we put the HD back in the Acer and booted from the CD to install Vista again. Immediately we get a message that says "a required CD/DVD device driver is missing. If you have a driver floppy disk, CD, DVD, or USB flash drive, please insert it now. If the windows installation media is in the CD/DVD drive, you can safely remove it for this step." This is a different message than we were getting before. The last time we tried, it was the serial ata controller that was missing. If we put the Vista CD in to do a repair, it says "select an OS to repair" but the box is empty. There is nothing there to select.

 

It seems that it could be a problem with it being a SATA DVDROM. I'm not sure of the workaround because I don't have a SATA DVDROM.

I'll take a look around.

Can you get into BIOS and see if there are any settings available for the DVDROM that could emulate an IDE device for OS install?

 

I don't see any settings to emulate an IDE device. On the Standard CMOS features page, when we go to the DVD drive it says SATA/Primary Slave channel. When you open that, it says Third IDE Slave. The only options that can be changed are the PIO mode and DMA mode. Both of these are on AUTO now.

 

What about an entry for SATA (not necessarily for the DVD but for the PC in general). Are there options there?

 

There are no options to change for the SATA at all. You can see that the hard drive and the DVD drive are SATA but can not make changes.

 

I see people with same problem but not a definitive solution.
Going back to trying to use the drivers you downloaded. It asks for the drivers. You have put the drivers on the root of the USB stick (taken them out of the folder). What happens when you insert the USB stick?

 

When we go back to repair and try to use the flash drive, it shows the flash drive as removable device c. You can't see the hard drive at all. We also cannot see the files that we just copied to the root of the flash drive either.

 

I know I am jumping around here but you don't have a SATA Mode option in BIOS? http://seoroot.com/blog/windows-xp/setup-did-not-find-any-hard-disk-drives-problem-fix.html

 

There is no SATA Mode on the Main page. Under Advanced Chipset Features, there is an option that says SATA Mode Select. The setting is RAID Mode, but it grey and can't be changed.

 

Yes, I'm really not good at SATA/RAID. I can't give you any good advice. I'd have to do some more reading. I've seen threads with your exact PC and problem but not a clear set of instructions.

It seems to me Vista shouldn't be having these problems. And if it does it should let you point to the drivers. Slipstreaming doesn't work for Vista so that is not an option.

Unless there is an option to disable RAID and then change the SATA mode or something like that. But again, I'm not good at this. I'll get back to you later if I find anything constructive because now I am just guessing.

 

Thank you so much for your help. I really appreciate it!! I have never run into anything like this before, and nothing I tried was working.

 

I am not sure if this is your problem but it is possible that Vista does not have support for the AHCI/Raid drivers of your computer. Go to the support site for your computer and download the AHCI driver for your OS. Either 32bit or 64bit and unzip it to the desktop. Burn the files to a CD or put them on a flash drive. When installing VISTA, see steps 14 & 15.

 

I'll just add to tgell's instructions that in this link it seems to show Vista finding .inf files when you are in Browse mode. So if you click on the C: drive (your USB) even though you don't see any files, is the OK button available or is it grayed out? If you hit OK do you then get a Window showing your HD?