Acer Aspire E1-522 Trying to breathe new life into an old laptop for a friend...

disenter

Hi. A friend of mine has a pretty old Acer Aspire E1-522 - the E1-2500 cpu version. Yep - dual core, 1.4ghz AMD, with Radeon gfx, 4Gb of DDR3, and a WD Blue 500gb hdd.

Truly terrible by todays standards!! To make matters worse, its running Windows 8 which support expired for January this year. He mentioned to me that it 'used to be fine, but now its really slow', oh an the battery was toast as it doesn't work without being plugged in anymore. But being that he's not very tech savvy, couldn't tell me much more. I agreed to help him out and see what I could do to fix it up.

So alot of the problem was he'd simply filled it to the absolute brim with files. It had 30Gb free, was a bit fragmented, and to make matters worse, all of his files were dropped on the desktop.

Windows 8 was not a happy camper.

So I got all his file off to my server for the meantime, and gave his hard drive a good scrub for all the junk files and the usual things. Removed some bloatware etc and it significantly improved it. But i wanted to see what else I could do. I found a extra 4gb stick of ddr3 for about $15. A replacement battery for $26, and grabbed a 500Gb ssd i had laying around. Still waiting for the ram and battery, but I knew a ssd would make a great improvement, maybe more than anything else.

I have an old ASTONE usb disk dock that can clone drives, but rather than risk doing it directly, I used Easus Partition Master software to clone the original drive to the SSD. This operation appeared to complete perfectly, and I went an put the SSD into the laptop. But it would not boot. Kept saying there wasn't a bootable device present.

So into the bios I go, and i found what I thought was the problem. Secure boot was enabled. So I set a supervisor password, and disabled the secure boot function, thinking this would be the end of it.

No such luck…. it continues to not boot, despite the fact the hard drive shows up in the bios no problem. I thought it could be that I needed to disable the secureboot functions and erase them, with the original drive in place first, and then clone the drive. So i went and did that, but same problem… It just refuses to boot with the ssd, with the original hdd's cloned image on it.

To prove that the drive can work with it, i formatted it as MBR instead, turned the bios mode back to Legacy instead of UEFI - which disables secure boot also - and installed Windows 10 no problem. An I'm tempted to leave it with that on it, as with a stripped down version like Tiny10 it's not bad. But it would be nice if he got it back with what he is used to seeing - and because it's just plain bugging the hell out of me now… Why will it not work???

Drive is fine, secureboot is disabled, but it wont boot with the cloned image of the original hdd. Does work if i install a different OS on the SSD, while in the laptop.

Thanks for reading. Hope someone can help me get to the bottom of this annoying issue….

Regards,

Dave.

[Edited  the  thread  to  add  model  name  to  the  title]

disenter

ok so since this I have also tried running the software on the laptop with its wd hard drive in it, and having the ssd connected via usb. This does not work. It seems to complete the clone with errors, but maybe a compatibility issue with my dock and the older laptop.
So I took both the hard drives and directly connected them to my desktops sata ports, and had it clone the drives with easus partition master, which completed a sector by sector clone successfully.

But still the ssd will not boot this ***** laptop!!
I still get the blah blah recovery tools needed, won't let me select boot options to repair windows at all. Pressing F8 just makes the screen blink. Laptop doesn't want to know about my 256gb usb stick, even if I format it as 8gb fat, unless the bios is set to legacy mode. But then the drive can't work because it's GPT.

This is ridiculously frustrating! It should be a simple thing to clone a hard drive to upgrade it.

here's a even stranger thing, I accidentally let my desktop clone my own system drive the first time, because I was frustrated and not paying attention that it had selected my drive as the source.
It's windows 10, but when I put it in the laptop it just said it's finding hardware devices which I thought was weird, but then up comes my own login on this laptop.
It worked perfectly fine!

So what is it about this original wd blue, windows 8.1 drive that is not cloning properly?

Help!!!