My friend has a Dell laptop, cant remember which model, but its about a year old, its a 17 incher, has a 3.2 ghz Core 2 Duo processor, a Geforce 8400 video card and vista. He had this laptop for about a year and decided to sell it to one of my coworkers. We sat down to wipe the harddrive and do a full system restore. Got the disc he made from the recovery partition and went to work.A little background, My friend who owned the laptop hadn’t done any “out of the ordinary” usage of the laptop, and was still on the initial install since the purchase. his use was moderate as it wasn’t his main PC. No configuration or hardware changes. It was pretty much in the same state as it was when he got it from Dell, should be easy right?
Well we started the recovery and went through the motions. The laptop was installing Windows and all we had to do was wait. After about an hour we came back to check and noticed the system was stuck on the last step of the install. We gave it a few more minutes, then decided to start over.
Got the same result 4 times in a row. Restore is going fine then it gets to the last step and hangs. after a while we gave up, and of coarse he lost his sale.
Later that night, he was trying to figure out what was going on with no luck. was just about to call Dell’s tech support when he found the solution to his problem (at a website other than Dell’s). What he had to do was go into the Bios, and switch the harddrive (a sata drive) from ATI to AHCI. He did so and it reinstalled windows like a champ. The thing he was thinking (I was too) why would you have to make a change like that if you never changed it in the first place? You would think it would already be set to AHCI being that it needs to be set to AHCI to install Vista? He brushes it off as a sneaky way to get you to pay for tech support. I don’t know if I agree but it does seem a bit odd.
No comments:
Post a Comment