My son's NE56R27U had a mainboard fault (a short somewhere on the board, couldn't isolate), so I purchased a new one from Gateway/Acer. Well, the board came, and I replaced it in the laptop, and now it won't recognize the hard drive. Before you start asking, I have two sons, and each has the same laptop, so I have been able to determine that the HDD is perfectly fine--I can put it in the other laptop and it works perfectly.
I also cannot use the Recovery Disk, it does not acknowledge it.
When the computer starts up, the splash screen now says "Acer" instead of "Gateway"....so I am concerned that there may be BIOS issues...
I looked at the BIOS (and compared it to the working laptop) and found that while the working laptop says it's a Gateway and has the serial number, the laptop with the new board says it's an Acer and has a bogus (123456789) serial number in the BIOS. I think this might be part of the problem. If I recall correctly, the recovery disk is only "good" for the specific laptop, and my guess is that it uses the serial number to verify that the disk "belongs" to that computer.
So, is this the likely problem, and how do I update this data? I can pull the latest BIOS updates from the gateway site, but they are packaged to run from Windows.
I would appreciate any insights...
Gail
