TravelMate P215-53 rollback W11 to W10

HenridB

Hi,

I recently bought a TravelMate P2 for my work, and it came with Windows 11. I tried it for a week but for now this OS doesn't seem ripe enough for professional use. So I tried installing Windows 10 instead, but no luck so far...
- I tried installing it from W11 directly, but got strange errors. (I don't remember the exact error, at that time I thought I could easily solve the problem so I didn't note the error)
- I tried installing it from an USB key, either with the Windows tool or with Rufus and a W10 iso (both methods advised here: https://www.windowscentral.com/how-create-windows-10-usb-bootable-media-uefi-support ) but in both cases the installer doesn't seem to find the drive to install to if I try to manually select a drive, and if I rely on the automatic install, it tells me that there is already a Windows instance on the drive and that I should launch the installer from Windows directly (cf previous poit: it doesn't work... Also, I sent an email to Acer's support about that, they suggested it may have something to do with the UEFI, but without giving a hint on what to do to solve the problem).
- I even tried installing a Linux distro (Ubuntu) and it worked perfectly! Once the distro installed, I have no more Windows on the computer, so I would expect that the previous point would be solved, but no...
- As a last step, I tried formatting the hard drive, thus no OS, but this still doesn't work

I also tried a few more things that changed nothing: different versions of W10, disabling secure boot on the UEFI

If *anyone* has an idea on what to do, I'm really stuck now

{Thread was edited to add model name to the title}

billsey

Which TravelMate P2 model did you buy? It should be a P2xx-xxx-xxxx or TMP2xx-xxx-xxxx. Some of the latest models have chipset for which they don't have W10 drivers so it can be problematic to put the old OS on them. Also look in the BIOS to see what mode the drives are configured for. You might have to install iRST drivers from the install flash drive.

HenridB

It's a P215-53, on the product page it was written that it was certified for W10 and W11. After A LOT of digging I found this page instructing to use the intel VDM driver, which I didn't find on the drivers page of my product. So I downloaded it directly on intel's website. After downloading all the drivers of my product on acer's page, I latter realized that the VDM driver was in fact in the list, but simply not advertised (it was under another name).

I'll have a small rant here: I both sent an email to Acer support, called them and asked for help in this forum. I can't say for the forum as I found the solution before we made any progress here, but both the email and the call were as unhelpful as possible. The email directed me toward a problem that had nothing to do with my situation, and the guy on the phone basically told me that I was a moron and did strictly nothing to help (he told me that the problem had nothing to do with Acer, where clearly it had since it was a driver issue that could have been solved in 10min instead of the 2 days it took me to find the solution)...

Anyway, thanks @billsey for your answer

billsey

The drivers section on Acer's support site for the P215-53 has drivers for both W10 and W11, so you are good to go there. You should only need to extract the drivers for iRST to the install media, then when prompted tell it to load those drivers and the drive will appear.