My Dell’s playin tricks on me
This was a weird problem a friend of mine ran into with a easy solution. The solution was easy, but it was a solution that I wouldn’t think would have to be done. Let me explain…
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.
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January 9th, 2009 at 12:54 am
When I got my dell laptop, about 1.5 years ago it came with windows vista… after about a week on it, I decided to reformat into windows xp, and I swear to you the computer ran so much better! It was like a new laptop all together, the thing was so much faster!
I hadn’t heard of the AHCI problem, maybe dell did that trick so they can make more money, and have the person send it in to reformat
hehe
January 11th, 2009 at 1:01 am
Man, as much as I hate dell, I think I hate Vista more. I couldn’t possibly imagine having a Dell computer with Vista installed!!!!!
January 11th, 2009 at 8:36 pm
That does seem odd, and quite counterintuitive. Still, I’m glad your friend was able to find a solution to the problem.
January 12th, 2009 at 5:09 pm
a
January 12th, 2009 at 5:10 pm
as usual..i have always liked dell laptops
January 19th, 2009 at 9:17 am
if the software is just so cheap, i’d rather reinstall it from the fresh start rather than using the recovery disc but of course it’s not. Well, i did encountered this changing SATA to AHCI vis versa just to make my installation work, take not its not Windows but a Linux system in a non-Dell PC.
January 22nd, 2009 at 5:56 pm
Recovery Disc “D” in my Vista Home Pre is almost totally Red.
Have about 350MB left out of bout 6GB. How do I delete some files and get some space back. Ta Ta.