upgrading Acer Aspire One D250 to Win 8 Pro - HDD issues

John_Easton

I need some advice about upgrading my Acer Aspire One D250-0BQr (SNID 94615284316, now with 2GB ram) from the original dual boot Windows XP Home (with SP3) / Android set up to a Windows 8 Pro only OS (newly purchased upgrade DVD). The problem appears to be with the hard drive, but I’m not convinced that’s where the issue actually lies.

 

I had chosen not to keep any files with the upgrade, so this should have been a (nearly) clean install. The upgrade procedure failed with the ubiquitous “there is a problem” error and now the install won’t start over or continue beyond that point when I restart from the Win 8 DVD.

 

The BIOS (the original InsydeHO2 v1.22 Intel V1585) does still see the hard drive (the original Seagate Momentus 5400.6 SATA ST9160314AS), but it doesn’t list the drive when I go on to try a custom install (which I believe I should be able to do, even with an upgrade disk). Running diskpart during the install tells me that “There are no fixed disks to show”.

 

I removed the HDD and tethered it to a Win 7 PC where I ran Seagate’s SeaTools diagnostic and repair utility, and then ran Checkdisk. Everything appears to be fine. The Disk Management utility on that PC tells me that its 149.05 GB is partitioned as, 10.GB Healthy OEM, 135GB NTFS Healthy Primary Partition, and 4.04GB Unallocated (presumably where Android used to reside?).

 

I have tried the custom install again using the new Crucial MX200 250GB SSD that I had intended to port the upgraded OS to subsequently, having initialised that first using the other PC (showing 232.88GB NTFS Healthy Primary Partition), but the Win 8 install doesn’t list that disk either, and diskpart also doesn’t show it.

 

I had thought about a BIOS upgrade (to Acer’s v1.29?), but I’m not convinced that is the problem, since the current BIOS does see the HDD.

 

Your help would be greatly appreciated.

 

I am not an IT professional by the way, only a novice PC hobbyist. So be gentle, and keep it as simple as you can.

JordanB

John_Easton,

 

I think you're going to have to get a working (and activated) operating system on your computer again...i.e. windows xp or windows vista or windows 7 so you can use your upgrade dvd.  Since you have the "upgrade only" version of Windows 8 pro, I don't think you can do a clean install of windows 8 pro on your ssd.  If you can install your windows xp recovery discs on that ssd, then I think you can use your winpro upgrade dvd.

 

I'm assuming that you have the "upgrade only" version of windows 8 pro.  Maybe that's not the case and you have full version of windows 8 pro????  Please post if you really have full version of win8pro, and it will be an easy fix.

 

Don't be afraid to call (or chat) microsoft either.  They are very  helpful with things like this.  You can just explain the situation and I'm sure they could probably give you good advice or resolve it. Anyway, that's what I would do....call microsoft.