[SOLVED] Aspire Desktop M3910 not able to see extra drives in BIOS ?

[Tim042]

Hi, i have a older Aspire M3910 with a 64-bit i7 CPU and Installed Win 10 on it. Then I migrated all my old Win 7 from another computer over to it and all works perfectly.
I can also send to another HD via a USB caddy and that is totally ok.

Problem was the BIOS was set to RAID and boot drive was loaded under that and i couldnt get BIOS to see any extra drives in SATA slots 3&4.

So I made changes in registry and changed bios to ACHI and Boot drive works fine but BIOS still doesn't see the extra drives and all i get is clicking and can't even get into BIOS now, and after some time Windows boots up and they are not seen there either.

Tried 3 different drives which i know are ok plus they cant all be bad logically.

Spoke to ACER and they said Win 10 not supported ect and that might be problem BUT boot drive/Windows etc all working perfectly so why cant BIOS see the extra drives and jamming the computer a bit? Boot drive is in SATA 1 and DVD in SATA 2, both working correctly.

Acer told me only 4 out of the 6 sata slots actually work even though 6 are on board?? hmm
Thanks for any assistance.

 

[SamirD]

I would remove the sata cables to all the other drives and try them one at a time. Sounds like there's other issues happening.

 

[Tim042]

I would remove the sata cables to all the other drives and try them one at a time. Sounds like there's other issues happening.

Hi, yeah already per the manual , put a second drive in sata 2 and the DVD in sata 3 and with AHCI, Bios finally saw it and after much time , it got into windows and i got error pop ups and instability ect eventhough that second drive is recognised.

So after many variations with bios and diff slots and the fact that even with a fresh battery, the bios forgot the time, i concluded that the Boot drive with Win 10 instead of 7 is not fully compatible with this board or a i have a weak bios and needs flashing , but the instructions there are vague and you have to use command line and this and that and frankly , as its a 2010 board and ACER said it wasnt tested for 10, i just keep it as a spare machine with one drive and DVD which seems to work perfectly, just not with 2 drives- unstable.

I get lots of computers and repair them and recycle as i know electronics, so as this was a free I7 CPU board , i though it be great with 4 cores for win 10, but looks like not all hardware compatible or maybe just a weak bios chip causing issues. not worth all the extra time given its out of date anyway and new M/Bs for 10 are everywhere .

It was a good learning experience with IDE/AHCI/raid in bios and how that effects the boot drive, but the clock drop off is concerning and means a hardware fault possibly in the chip or circuits so i leave this one as a spare and move on..

 

[SamirD]

Thank you for sharing. Win 7 also uses all the cores, or should I say it allows applications to use them all. Win 10 is a core hog doing who knows what with the cores...

 

[Tim042]

Thank you for sharing. Win 7 also uses all the cores, or should I say it allows applications to use them all. Win 10 is a core hog doing who knows what with the cores...

Yeah Microsoft said win 10 will be the last?? What about as the internet evolves and the original 10 program just keeps getting patched up. wont there be a time when service packs ect, it just wont work right and there will be a fresh win11 or 12 with new code? Anyway thats their problem and those guys are pretty sharp, so will work it all out. Maybe the future is Linux?
Can i ask you a question on USERS. I used PCmover to shift my win 7 over to this Acer win 10 machine and all good surprisingly, but as i predicted , i have sort of extra users mess mixed in to this machine from the 7 asus computer.
So only ONE user shows up in users as administrator - me, but the log in screen has 2 showing and i guess the programs i brought across work all good, but can i clean up all the win 7 users so it all comes under just me now on this machine as admin and delete that extra Tim at the log in window? Messy question i know- thanks if you can help

 

[SamirD]

Win 10 definitely won't be the last, but it is getting long in the tooth although it does the job for a large number of people around the world or it wouldn't be the dominating OS worldwide.

I'm not sure what that program was or what it did, but I wouldn't mess with trying to get rid of the extra users until you have a full backup of that drive with something like clonezilla so you can restore it in case you mess up.

 

[Tim042]

Win 10 definitely won't be the last, but it is getting long in the tooth although it does the job for a large number of people around the world or it wouldn't be the dominating OS worldwide.

I'm not sure what that program was or what it did, but I wouldn't mess with trying to get rid of the extra users until you have a full backup of that drive with something like clonezilla so you can restore it in case you mess up.

Haha, i do that totally with image and restore point in case something goes wrong. same when you change the registry or experiment. windows of course creates one when a change is made but not always and a update could screw things up. Win 10 never seems as "friendly" as 7 , but i see you can get programs to alter the look so it looks like 7 or you can move things around which i did. I already set updates to "manual" so it only updates when i want and many laptop owners are complaining their machine is always updating slowing it down to a crawl when you only have say 2ghz and limited memory.
Users- thanks anyway, i thought it be a bit messy to answer as you would really need to see the computer to work out how to clean it up. I might look for a app that can automate a cleanup as theirs apps for everything. I have used pcmover and Macrium cloner and they are great and free if you dont already used them Pcmover i got for a few bucks on ebay and it moved 7-10 very well and that was on that dicky Acer M/B
Veracrypt is very good also free and versatile to protect drives/partitions ect with at least 128 bit last time i used it. VPN's use 256, so maybe they will offer this if not already.
So much good cheap useful software out there and cheap keys and Linux, so easy to build a good computer and sites like this for advice for those curly problems you inevitably get..

 

[SamirD]

I wouldn't trust MS devices for backup and restore. I still have a laptop that I need to manually fix from a botched restore point that left it without any admin user. Now I use clonezilla to clone a setup so I can restore it right back to exactly how it was in case something goes wrong. Saved me quite a few times and it's free.

If you already have macrium use that to clone the system. I wouldn't worry about encryption as the biggest problem I've seen with using that too much is that the owner forgets the pw and then the data is gone, lol.

Yeah there's a lot of great stuff out there. I still remember when Ghost came out and that became the deployment software of choice, and then norton bought it and then time rolled on and now we have a free product that is far better than the original ghost was.