Acer 5050 Nightmare

[malcolmswaine]

I recently bought an ACER ASPIRE 5050 notebook. The specs looked great, AMD 64 bit dual core processor, 1GB DDR II nice big hard disk etc. all for about 35,000 B

After getting the machine home I found a rather shoddy 32 bit windows XP 2005 media edition installation riddled with crap programs all hogging resources and causing what would have been a quick booting machine to take 2-3 times longer to boot up.

So, not being overjoyed and spotting the obvious stupidity of having a 32 bit operating system running on 64 bit capable hardware I reached for my Windows 2003 Server x64 edition DVD and proceeded with a fresh install.

The OS installed ok – so far so good.

When I check the device manager in my windows system tools however I can see a few unrecognized things mainly sounds and graphics related. So of course I look on Acers support site for drivers

What a pile of pants!!!

A vague list of drivers mostly for 32 bit operating system – and some of the hardware on the machine (it ships with a built in web cam) don’t even have 64 bit drivers – not in this know universe it would seem anyway!

So a day of locating the correct drivers from 3rd party manufacturer web sites – I can see my weekend slipping away….

End of the day all drivers sorted, so I head off to bed and leaving the machine powered on.

…..

Next morning I come back to the machine and find it in some suspended sleep mode from which I cannot waken it. Blank screen and completely unresponsive to any kind of keystroke combination. So naturally I power it off, give it a minute to catch its breath and power it back on again.

Everything starts to boot ok but then halfway through loading windows it hangs indefinitely. Things are looking bad now. I try again and again but no luck. I try in safe mode, no luck either and from the diagnostics I can see…

The OS hangs when loading up acpitabl.dat

Which I believe is when the OS is trying to load up the correct IDE BUS drivers.

I think maybe by some fluke I can cure things with a reinstall, so once again I whip out my 2003 disk hoping for a reinstall and repair. No luck, the installation hangs indefinitely as well.

Now I can neither boot nor reinstall the Operating System

Things are not looking good, so I try to load up a 32 bit windows 2000 install hoping that this was just a 64 bit issue. No luck either – endless boot cycles – it seems nothing is actually getting written to disk. Now I’m starting to get a little worried.

A little further investigation would indicate that this is not a new problem in the 64 bit world especially concerning 2003 Server SP1. As far as I can see what happening is this :

When Windows loads it tries to find suitable drivers for the functionality provided by the integrated chipset. It then loads the manufacturers driver (which is correct), but in this case, the manufacturer (ATI) haven’t ‘WHQL’d their drivers, and windows not trusting the unsigned driver tries to load up the Microsoft PCI-IDE drivers which subsequently don’t work and hang the boot.

At this stage I don’t know the chipset manufacturer because the ‘warranty void if removed’ stickers plastered over the back of the machine are stopping me from inspecting the hardware. So I make an educated guess that I’m probably looking at ATI or NVIDIA.

I wrongly choose NVIDIA and using a handy utility (nLite) for building windows installations and PE’s, I knock up a new Windows 2003 Server installation disk with what I presume are the correct chipset drivers downloaded from the NVIDIA support site and integrate them into the install.

So I go for a fresh install, but halfway through the initial driver loading process windows informs me that the NVIDEA driver I wanted to use is incorrect for the hardware on the machine. OK, fair enough windows, the drivers are wrong, thanks for telling me, I'll try something else, ATI is the next best bet.

After a reboot though, nothing zilch.

THE BIOS IS NOW CORRUPT!!!

I can't even flash the BIOS because

1) blank screen (also tested with another monitor off aux VGA port)

2) wont boot off CD / DVD / USB Floppy

I've built a legacy DOS boot disk with the Acer flash bios program (phlash16) also on the disk. Inside the autoexec.bat it says something to the effect of

beep (I have no visual confirmation so i.e. echo ^G is the only way I know if the disk has booted)

run phlash16.exe with the correct parameters pointing to the file supplied by ACER for this BIOS

beep again to let me know the bios phlashing program returned

but there’s not a lot of beeping going on sadly, so I assume there’s not a lot of booting going on either...

I've also tried the 'emergency BIOS restore' method with a USB floppy as detailed in this article - no luck.

In an act of desperation I've since cracked the machine open, removed the watch battery and let it sit there for 10 hours hoping that by some miracle the BIOS configuration was kept alive by the watch battery. This hasn’t helped my ‘warranty void’ if you open the box situation too much!!!

I didn’t realize it was humanly possible to do so much damage with an installation of an OS. The machine has been sent back to Acer dealer - no doubt they'll want to charge me for a new motherboard.

Nightmare... !!!

[cdnvic]

Sounds like a nightmare alright. I've had good luck with Acer desktops but this isn't the first time I've heard of trouble with notebooks.

Just because the processor can handle 64bit doesn't mean the rest of the hardware can. Almost everything AMD ships now is 64bit capable, but they get showhorned into some piss-weak motherboards sometimes. You're putting pretty powerful server software on a piece of hardware that was never meant to run as a server.

[Rice_King]

I am sorry this happened to you malcolmswaine. I personally appreciate the fact that you decided to share this story. Possibly someone will gain insight from your misfortune and misadventure. Thanks to your posting, I learned about the nLite Deployment Tool.

[rak sa_ngop]

I have an ACER Aspire PC desk top and earlier this year I had a total system crash. I took the machine back to the shop I purchased the PC from (in Pantip Plaza) and they showed me where to take machine to (also in Pantip Plaza). Not the Acer Service shop because apparently they do not fix software problems there but use another (appointed?) company to do this.

What is shocking is that I have seen inside the back room at the Acer Service shop and it was crammed full of notebooks and desk top PC all waiting to be processed/repaired. (This was when I first bought my PC and some software was corrupted).

Maybe best to avoid the Acer shop initially and find out where to checkout your software first. I would think this will also save a lot of time as my software repair only took several days as opposed to Acer's "wait a week and then call us" service.

Not sure if I am doing Acer a disservice here but that was my experience (my PC however is working great with no hardware problems).

[pampal]

Although it's possible to have notebooks acting as servers, this is not the best option. If you must load server software, try windows 2000 advanced server. I have installed this on many a laptop without problems. The only problem is that microsoft only supports their software for 5-7 years from date of introduction. So drivers and upgrades are scarce to non existent as this software is no longer supported. Linux is a better way to go my friend. All the free support you want at a very low price.

[malcolmswaine]

Thanks for the advice rak sa_ngop. I'm on Samui and the notebook makes its repair journey through a local dealer first (who's technicians have already throw their hands up in the air) before continuing its travels, presumably to Acer, so not a lot of choice on my behalf sadly. I'm expecting to have to get a new machine, after all, if I can trash it that easily one time, there's a good chance I'll do it again since I need to perform roughly the same steps if/when it comes back.

Cheers,

Malc

[Simmo]

64bit versions of Windows have a lack of drivers and software support at the moment. There's no reason to run unless you have more than 4GB of memory as there's little or no performance benefit.

You were asking for trouble trying to install 64 bit Windows 2003 on a notebook.

[cdnvic]

64bit versions of Windows have a lack of drivers and software support at the moment. There's no reason to run unless you have more than 4GB of memory as there's little or no performance benefit.

You were asking for trouble trying to install 64 bit Windows 2003 on a notebook.

For a server configuration 64bit is fine, and in Vista and XP 64bit versions the kernal is locked down, making it much more secure than the 32bit versions. Look for alot more drivers for 64bit being available as Vista enters the market.

For a laptop though, I agree, it's a bit much

[malcolmswaine]

Just to clarify

Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition

Requirements

Computer and processor

133-MHz or faster processor for x86-based PCs; 733-MHz for Itanium-based PCs; up to eight processors supported on either the 32-bit or the 64-bit version

Memory

128 MB of RAM minimum required; maximum: 32 GB for x86-based PCs with the 32-bit version and 64 GB for Itanium-based PCs with the 64-bit version

Hard disk

1.5 GB of available hard-disk space for x86-based PCs; 2 GB for Itanium-based PCs; additional space is required if installing over a network

Drive

CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive

Display

VGA or hardware that supports console redirection required

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003...efault.mspx#EMD

[malcolmswaine]

There's no reason to run unless you have more than 4GB of memory as there's little or no performance benefit.

You were asking for trouble trying to install 64 bit Windows 2003 on a notebook.

I'm sorry but that really annoys me. If I'm compiling my own code optimized for a 64 bit processor I think I may get some performance benefit no? And why am I asking for trouble - the hardware according to Microsoft is more than capable of supporting the software? Just to avoid any more confusion - it was intended as a development platform, not as a mission critical Domain Controller for a 50,000 node network.