BIOS Not Recognizing Legacy

I have a E1-572-5870 laptop. It had Windows 7 Home home premium on it.

I had a chat with one of your techs who was not helpful. There solution was to send off my day old laptop to a repair center in Texas. This is NOT a good solution to tell your customers. I'm going to take this back to the store and get my money back before I send it off to a repair center. That's a dumb solution!

I'm trying to use MBR instead of GPT. Every time I install Windows it sets it as GPT even though the BIOS is set to use Legacy. I have upgraded the BIOS to 2.17 and still the issue remains. The BIOS is set to use Legacy, which from experiance is an MBR partitioning scheme. So if this is set, why is my Windows install being set to GPT?

Is the disk locked? Do I need to replace the disk as you flashed firmware and is forcing this setting? There is no value in forcing a less than 2TB drive to GPT.

I've opened diskpart, cleaned the partition, converted to MBR and tried to install. Windows always ends up with GPT instead of MBR.

What steps do I need to take to make my partitioning scheme be MBR?

Thanks!

Accepted answers

ModelE1572

Secure boot is disabled by default. If I select UEFI, save, reboot then it gives me the option to enable/disable secure boot.

Being an engineer, and being in the tech industry for 15+ years, I find this ridiculous that I can't set it to MBR. Acer has done something to midigate an MBR partition scheme. Not sure if its a BIOS issue, or a firmware issue on the disk. The fact that the Legacy BIOS option does nothing is fubar. I can do only one more thing and that is replace the hdd. If that fails, I'm taking this back and will never buy an Acer again. I've never had this much trouble getting a system customized.

Thanks for the link and the help philetus!

All comments

philetus

When installing Windows in UEFI mode, it will default to GPT. Whereas in BIOS mode it will default to MBR. I don't believe there's a workaround for this short of turning off UEFI.

ModelE1572

Are you saying this model does not support BIOS mode?

In BIOS, it gives me "Legacy" or "UEFI". It's set as Legacy. So I'd think I'm in BIOS mode... unless its not working correctly???

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh825112.aspx

"BIOS: To prevent Windows Setup or Windows PE from booting in UEFI mode, remove the efi folder on the root of the media."

I'm trying this now with a USB pen drive as its the one thing I did not try....

Thanks!

ModelE1572

Did not resolve.

Also tried:

At first installer screen Press Shift + F10 to open a Command Box, type:

DISKPART
LIST DISK
SEL DIS 0 (after confirming Windows 7 target HD #)
CLEAN
CONVERT MBR
CREATE PARTITION PRIMARY SIZE=102400 (for 100gb partition, adjust as desired)
FORMAT FS=NTFS LABEL="WINDOWS 7"
ACTIVE
EXIT
EXIT

Did not help.

Enabled the F12 menu to boot from CDROM, did not work. What's the matter with this BIOS/Hardware? Did Acer do something to prevent MBR?

philetus

Does your Bios have a setting for secure boot and if it does did you disable it? I'm not sure if it matters, but that's what I did when I went from 8 to 7.

philetus

I hope this helps:

http://www.rodsbooks.com/gdisk/bios.html

ModelE1572

Secure boot is disabled by default. If I select UEFI, save, reboot then it gives me the option to enable/disable secure boot.

Being an engineer, and being in the tech industry for 15+ years, I find this ridiculous that I can't set it to MBR. Acer has done something to midigate an MBR partition scheme. Not sure if its a BIOS issue, or a firmware issue on the disk. The fact that the Legacy BIOS option does nothing is fubar. I can do only one more thing and that is replace the hdd. If that fails, I'm taking this back and will never buy an Acer again. I've never had this much trouble getting a system customized.

Thanks for the link and the help philetus!

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