Acer TimelineU M5-581T| UEFI| Windows installation problem

hi,
i am having a peculiar problem with my newly purchased Acer TimelineU M5-581T laptop. it has 20GB SSD and 500GB HDD and UEFI MB also supports legacy BIOS. it came with Windows-8 pre-installed and had a single drive C:. i needed to partition it and had created drive D: with windows disk management tool by shrinking drive C: and then creating drive D: with available space. problem started to happen after that when i restarted laptop, it was failing to boot on Windows-8 and was going to repair option - eventually that was too failing, but i think i didn't try all the options under repair. i also don't have Acer recovery or restore disks with me, last i got that i should have created the disks before.

since repair didn't work, i tried to fresh install windows-7 from bootable USB containing windows-7 x64 installation.

1. with UEFI option and secureboot enabled, it didn't go through. it recognizes USB bootable disk, but unable to boot for security reason (may be because of secure-boot was enabled)

2. then i tried with disable secureboot, it did go through this time, at least till starting installation and then hangs when windows logo appeared before windows custom selection screen (disk selection). waited for hours nothing happened except the the windows logo. tried several times, same thing. FYI, the USB bootable flash media was created using Rufus with UEFI mode option selected

3. then option left with legacy bios. tried with legacy bios (secureboot option was ghosted, anyway disabled from previous try). installation was started, got the selection scree, saw three disks (20 GB SSD, 500 GB HDD and 16 GB usb flash disk). was showing windows can't install on SSD, space is less - fine, i understood.created a 50GB partition on HDD, when formatting was showing unable to format some 0x000... error. got stuck again. searched the forum, some solution says to open command prompt and use diskpart command to clean HDD fully

4. when trying to clean HDD with diskpart command, it showed all the disks by "list disk". when tried clean disk after selecting disk, it failed to do that. then when gave list disk again, it showed only the SSD and USB flash disk, but not the HDD. i had to exist from the command and restart laptop, got the HDD in disks list but same problem continued to happen, was not able to clean or format disk

5. i followd some of the posts here in sevenforum and eightforum, tried to do what was advised, but didn't work

i don't think its a problem with the HDD, because t was working fine with windows-8 before. thats why didn't try with any disk-checking or repair utility. it may be with some security feature related to UEFI or may be with this type of new generation laptops. i will give a try with windows-8 64-bit, but i think the result will be same.

if anyone can advise how can i successfully install windows-7 or even windows-8, will be much help for me. i am looking for a solution to get rid of this situation. i have Windows 8 x64, and willing to use UEFI for maximum performance.

also if someone can tell me from where i can get the recovery disks for this model, since this product didn't come with the disks, neither i created one while it was running on Windows-8.

 

further update:

what i got to know from sevenforum is that, the SSD and HDD is Raid on UEFU motherboard using Intel IRST acceleration cache, and what it seems is to delete/break this raid or configuration before ionstallation, otherwise it will be having the same problem.

even i tried with UEFI + Secureboot enabled which is allowed to take Windows 8 USB bootable disk (created by Rufus), this time i got error during HDD partition. it says "we couldn't create a new partition. error 0x......".

and if i leave the disk just unpartitioned and click next to continue with installtion, then it says "unable to format a partition on disk 0. the error occurred while preparing the partition selected for installation. error code 0x.......".

 

i did it finally worked-out without the recovery disks. will share details later.

 

You need the RAID drivers before you can proceed, they are not preloaded on windows, if you have a SSD cache you need the RAID drivers as well. Glad you fixed it anyways.