Notebooks & Netbooks

[MDacerGuy]

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themadmax wrote:

Threre is still an mSata slot unused, so you can have an mSata and the HDD

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yeh but how to have it boot from the mSata SSD? i want windows on there, and use the 1TB regualr spinning hard drive to hold my music and movies etc

[MDacerGuy]

sorry i didnt read your post before mine

thanks for all the info

im going to order a mSata and try this out

thanks again

[EvlSmrk]

Tried to install a Crucial m500 120gb msata into my r7-572 this weekend and everything seemed to be going well. Cloned the hdd to the ssd, rebooted automatically from the ssd (even though it didn't seem to show up in the boot order in the bios), and everything seemed to be going fine. Formatted the hdd, and all sorts of crap happened. Couldn't load into windows, the usb thumb drive doesn't appear to have the OS on it, tech support was no help. Now I'm waiting on the recovery flash drive I ordered from Acer hoping that'll get me going again. Be careful when you do this and don't clone.

[MDacerGuy]

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EvlSmrk wrote:
Tried to install a Crucial m500 120gb msata into my r7-572 this weekend and everything seemed to be going well. Cloned the hdd to the ssd, rebooted automatically from the ssd (even though it didn't seem to show up in the boot order in the bios), and everything seemed to be going fine. Formatted the hdd, and all sorts of crap happened. Couldn't load into windows, the usb thumb drive doesn't appear to have the OS on it, tech support was no help. Now I'm waiting on the recovery flash drive I ordered from Acer hoping that'll get me going again. Be careful when you do this and don't clone.

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I didnt clone. But I did the recovery thing to USB

so i took my HDD out,and put the msata in.

installed windows (fresh install)

put my program back on (using a program migrator)

all was good

so I put my HDD back in, however, I didnt format my HDD (so the windows was till on there)

a couple weeks later, i realized my windows loaded up real slow (from 2 seconds back to like 50)

but it was loading windows from the HDD

in Bios the msata doesnt show up on bootlist,so i had to keep hitting f10 to manual pull up the boot list and select msata

so then i deleted all my windows files on the 1 TB hdd,now when i boot up it always goes to the msata(which is only drive that has windows now)

are you sure your problem isnt that windows is looking for windows on your harddrive?

on a reboot, right when acer screen pops up, hit f10 to bring up bootlist (this the only way ive noticed msata to show up in any boot list)

choose your msata

but yeah you shoulda made a USB recovery, it works a treat

[EvlSmrk]

I tried the USB recovery from the get-go, but think there's a problem with it since it's not being recognized as having the required files. I'll try the F10 trick, but I may have accidentally chosen to format both the hdd and ssd while attempting to recover thinking the USB would bail me out. Worse case scenario, I'll reformat both and use the USB that Acer sends to get her up and rocking again if nothing else works. Thanks for the tips and advice.

[EvlSmrk]

No joy. Both drives are formatted. There are several files on the thumb drive I used for the recovery, but it isn't being recognized as a device I can use to install for some reason. I'm thinking there's an extra file or folder on it that might be causing the confusion.

[PenguinJim]

I used a fresh 16GB USB drive for recovery - they're only $10 - when I tried to replace my HDD with a mSATA drive (an M5M). The USB recovery worked (and the HDD was physically removed from the laptop), but for some reason towards the end of setup, it would encounter an error and fail. I tried a few times. Wiping the original HDD and recovering onto there worked (although it was SLOW!). Eventually I cloned the restored HDD onto the M5M. The cloning software worked. I basically followed this guide. I'm reasonably sure that UEFI wasn't letting me reinstall onto a new drive, but disabling UEFI in the BIOS creates even bigger problems!

So: UEFI is a bad thing. But don't disable UEFI in the BIOS!

Use a fresh, unpartitioned 16GB USB drive for Recovery, and just let the utility have its way with the drive. Toss it in a drawer after you're finished, and add that $10 onto the cost of the R7.

Cloning is one solution.

[EvlSmrk]

That was the guide that I was following, at least for the most part.  Using EaseUS Todo worked great for cloning the drive over.  It wasn't until I formatted the HDD that I ran into issues.  When I started to have problems, I think I broke the cardinal rule and panicked.  Once the recovery USB arrives from Acer, I plan on again formatting both drives and using the USB recovery to try and install directly onto the SSD.  If that doesn't work, I'll install onto the HDD and then clone over to the SSD, but try not to panick if things go awry again.  Might've been the boot sequence that was causing the initial error and then an incorrect selection or not what was really going on that resulted in the current situation.  Thanks for all of the tips.

[EvlSmrk]

The Recovery USB arrived today. Everything seemed to be going really well until it restarted and now it gives me the "no bootable device -- insert boot disk and press any key" error. According to Acer Tech Support chat, it's a hardware issue and I need to send it in. Any ideas?

[greg1]

I don't have a lot of experience with UEFI, but with it enabled, your drive needs to have a GPT and not an MBR to boot.  So if you had previously formatted the drive and did not delete whatever partitions were on it before starting the recovery, it may have remained an MBR drive.

Here's some reading for you:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/hardware/gg463524