SSD Not Recognized on D270 - Help Request

I have my son's old Acer Aspire One D270 8.9" pc with Windows 7.
It came with 1gb RAM which Ive upgraded to 2gb (max)
I have a plan to put Windows 10 on as apparently it runs really well on older devices and it would make it a neat little device.

*there is a compatibility issue with the Intel Graphics Accelerator 3600 that affects the touchpad which prevents a direct upgrade but you can install Windows 10 from an ISO file on a USB stick and then possibly install the Windows 7 driver for the IGA 3600.

So I decided to first clone the HDD with Windows 7 on it to a 64gb kingston SSD just so the unit is as speedy as possible.
but when I boot I get the following:

Realtek PCIe FE family controller series v1.27 (10/31/11)
PXE-E61: Media test failure, check cable

PXE-M0F: Exiting PXE ROM.
No bootable device - insert boot disk and press any key

Or in other words, it isnt working.


In the BIOS the "HDD" is listed as a Kingston 64GB - even though its a SSD
SATA is set to AHCI Mode
Boot Sequence is
HDD0
USB FDD
USB HDD
USB CDROM
ATAPI CDROM
Network Boot : Realtek PXE B01 D00

Now as it lists a HDD it obviously does not recognize an SSD, so I contacted Acer support who replied:

This unit does not support SSD drive, you can add hardware on the unit; however, by doing so, if you damage any internal components of the product, this will void the warranty.

We neither recommend nor support upgrading/downgrading hardware/software on the product as it may lead to compatibility issues. If you wish to upgrade/downgrade hardware/software on the product, we request you to contact a local technician for assistance.

I would think this means it can be done but what would it involve? Anyone with any ideas?
BIOS update? Motherboard driver updates?

I was advised to try changing boot mode to Legacy+UEFI but there is no option for that in BIOS

Thanks.

 

Welcome to the laptop-forums site

The message “No bootable device - insert boot disk and press any key”
just signify s that it cannot find an operating system.

Try formatting the ssd then retrying the installation again.

Driver booster 3 will help you obtain your drivers.

 

OK ill do a full format on the ssd, but do i install the driver booster on the hdd before cloning it to the ssd?

 

No driver booster is when you have installed your new system on to the ssd

 

I'm sorry if I cannot contribute on this thread but I am very interested because we also plan to use SSD instead of HDD when we buy a new computer. From what I understand right now, the SSD is treated like a USB drive. But since your computer treats the SSD as a SATA disk drive, that's the clue to the problem. It's not really the BIOS, I guess, but the setting in the OS. Maybe you can ask a tech on how to go about it. I'm sure there is a bypass somewhere so the SSD will not be treated as HDD.

 

Your answer has raised some questions Corzhen,so i've checked my bios settings.
Given my machine is fairly new, my bios lists the ssd drive as a sata drive.

All new machines will work with ssd drives,it's only very old machine bios
that could present problems.

 

The problem is that you're cloning the drive and it's still thinking that it's a regular hard drive and not a solid state drive. You have to be careful because if it's cloned incorrectly, it will copy the attributes of the drive it was on and try to register and emulate as that drive, instead of the solid state drive you're trying to use and clone it to.

Solid State Drives work universally the same as regular motor-based drives when it comes to how it's read from the controller. All of the differences between a normal sata hard drive and a solid state sata drive are masked so that the user doesn't have to worry about them usually. So Acer is just giving you a blanket answer from support there that won't be very helpful.

But when you clone the file system of a magnetic drive, the solid state drive has to set up its emulation for a magnetic drive first and the virtual dos or / virtual FS you're using.

If that isn't in place, the system is not going to see the drive, or it's going to try and read or write to it as if it were still the magnetic drive you cloned it from and have a parity error and halt trying to load from it when you start the machine.

If that's your only copy of the data you want to save, you may still be able to access the drive, but you'd have to do so from an external docking bay and an operating system (preferably linux or bsd, but windows will work) to recognize it and then smooth over those differences behind the scenes of the solid state drive so you can access it like a normal external drive with a drive letter.

If you don't need the data that is on that drive and just want to reinstall Windows 7, then you may want to use a live CD of linux like Knoppix, Lubuntu, etc and run GParted on it. You can delete the damaged file system with it, and then create a FAT32 or NTFS partition that the Windows installer will be able to see again.

I had this happen to me with an Acer and an Emachines (two office systems brought to me for repair) about 7 months ago to where they tried to do the exact same thing and clone a magnetic drive to an SSD. They had all of their data backed up already, so I had to reinstall for them...but the drive wasn't being seen at all. It had to be reinitialized and have the drive interact with the controller the way it's supposed to to reset its file system and virtual layer with how it interacts with it to register correctly again as a normal drive.

Your BIOS normally doesn't affect the drive since everything that the system needs to see happens at the controller level with an SSD. This is also why you're able to use the rare PATA/IDE SSD drives on even the oldest Pentium systems and still have it work as if it were a regular IDE drive, regardless of the BIOS revision.

Try that, and see if you're able to reset the drive with it. Lubuntu Linux should help you to get a live CD you can burn as an ISO or install to a usb flash drive to boot from. You can also use something like Universal NetBoot Installer to instantly download and make a live bootable USB of a version of linux with what you need on it.

 

Oh, I wanted to mention that if you do need to salvage the data from the SSD drive but it isn't coming up as a normal drive letter or accessible drive from Windows or Linux, you can still use CGSecurity's TestDisk to read the drive in most cases and copy what is read raw to another drive that can be used to temporarily store the data until you're ready to copy it back to the newly installed system. There's other tools in addition to this I tend to use if it's not reading it even with Testdisk, but usually Testdisk can get back what you need the majority of the time without any issues and supports a vast array of different file types and drives. They've supported the raw mode for SSDs since at least 2011, so you should be okay there.

If you can see the drive but it's having issues copying past it without TestDisk and you're using Windows, you can use a program called Unstoppable Copier that will read through most CRC errors and do a few other techniques to make sure you can read and copy from the rest of the drive if you need to.

P.S: After you've reinstalled Windows, then you can add the DriveBooster program back to it. That just manages garbage collection, and maximizes the hardware of the SSD drive for performance for you with the OS.

 

Yes I had not taken into consideration the fact that some cloning software will not clone hdd to ssd, "most new ones do".

If the member does a installation using either the dvds or floppies supplied then it will work.

 

After the new post from IBMPC8088, Which reminded me that cloning from a hdd to a ssd can be somewhat involved, if you are using a program that is not capable of cloning hdd to ssd

Then this program will help you clone your drives.


http://www.backup-utility.com/clone/migrate-operating-system-to-ssd.html

 

Success !
Well, kind of.

Rather than clone my HDD, in the end I just did a full reformat of the ssd, stuck it in the laptop with a usb stick with windows 10 on it and everything worked fine.

 

Hope you didn't lose any data off of the old drive, but glad to hear that your system is working once again.