help with aspire 9402 wiindows installation

Hi, all,

I recently got a Aspire 9402 without HD, so I just pop in another HD. However, I have problem installing a fresh XP onto it. You guys might know the answer.

First, I put in an HD with XP installed that worked perfectly on a dell 600m. The Acer gave me a blue screen. This looks reasonable since everything is different.

Then I put in a formatted clean HD set to active, and a bootable windows XP installation CD into either the built-in DVD-burner or USB DVD-RW driver. During the startup, I pressed F12 to select the right boot device. However, Acer always gave me error message, and would not boot from CD. I also tried Windows 7 or Vista disks, still no go.

It seems to me that Acer is different to other brands I have dealt with, like Dell or HP. I am not sure getting a set of recovery Disks from Acer would solve the problem.

Thanks in advance!

Thomas

 

update: it always say missing NTLDR

I think I am going to update to the latest bios

 

I downloaded the latest bios updating package from Acer site, Version 1.10

My question is: do I have to run it in a windows environment?

Or I have to make a bootable winPE USB drive to do Bio upgrading

 

Hi, sounds like it still trying to boot from something on the hard drive to me. I would set the bios to load from the cd/dvd first then install your OS and not use the F12 method...
Chris

 

Thanks chris

I have never tried this though.

I will give it a shot tonight when I get home

 

I wish it would work like this...


No, it does not work

Something must be wrong with my MB setting that I have yet figured out

 

Hi, its not a Sata drive is it, if so you'll probably need to slipstream the drivers into a XP CD. Sorry I don't know the specs of a 9402. Another thing is to make sure the drive is completely clean, not partitoned or formatted, XP can do all that for you...
Chris

 

no, it is not SATA, it is IDE

I formatted the who HDD on another computer in pqmagic, removed the hidden partition (only ~100M)

Previously, the HDD has win7 on it, runs fine
But I thought Pentium M 1.7 would do better with XP, so I formatted, as I have done many times on other computers.

I did not expect so much trouble.


Another quesiton: should I have the HDD in FAT32 or NTFS? Or does that matter?

 

Hi, as I said, let XP handle the setting up of a partition and make it NTFS, so as too make sure that pqmagic hasn't got something that doesn't agree with XP, you'll only need to do it 'quick'.
Chris