Having a hard time upgrading to Vista

Alright, so at work we have Acer laptops, one being the Aspire 3690. Initially they were installed with XP Pro and being Acer laptops, they were formatted with FAT32.

Not good for Vista of course, as it does not support FAT32.

So, I started off trying to convert the drives to NTFS using the Start, Run menu then the convert command. It gave the understandable message that the disk would have to be dismounted in order for the conversion to happen. However, when I told it to dismount, it never did, but instead, just closed off its own box and that was it.

So I bought out The Ultimate Boot CD to use one of the apps on it to try to convert the drive, but nothing worked, possibly to do with the cd itself. Not sure.

Anyway, I decided to use an old Windows 2000 Pro disk to do the job, so I installed 2000 on the machine, and of course, formatted the disk for NTFS. Then I popped in the Vista Upgrade disk (yes, Upgrade) and it told me it needed to upgrade from 2000 SP 4. So I hopped on the internet and go SP4, installed it then popped the disk back in.

Then I got a ACPI compatibility error that says This computer is not compliant with the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) standard. Windows must be installed onto a computer that supports ACPI. COntact your computer manufacturer for a BIOS update or install Windows on a ACPI-compliant somputer."

So I looked on Acer's website to find a solution, and found that I needed to upgrade the BIOS. Fair enough, so I did.

Now I supposedly have an upgraded enough BIOS. So I popped the Vista Upgrade disk back in, and its giving me exactly the same thing.

Any idea how to solve this?

I have to have these 2 laptops done and upgraded by Tuesday so if anyone has a solution, please let me know. I'm a little desperate as I'm sure you can tell.

Dan