Saturday, March 28, 2015

Installing Win 8.1 in ACER One 14 (Z1401-C7J6)

This new model of laptop is a new standard UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface).


What is UEFI and how it affects your classic installation of windows via USB boot or DVD? 

" is a specification that defines a software interface between an operating system and platform firmware. UEFI is meant to replace the Basic Input/Output System (BIOS) firmware interface, originally present in all IBM PC-compatible personal computers.  In practice, most UEFI firmware images provide legacy support for BIOS services. UEFI can support remote diagnostics and repair of computers, even without another operating system"

So next thing you need to understand is how to setup your CMOS setup to be able to read your USB device Installer or Windows CD installer, on this post we will discuss this model of user which took me 2 hours to figure it out. 

Without setting up the cmos or common called bios, you cannot boot from USB or CD on your new generation Laptop. 

Power up you Laptop and Press F2 or Del key, you may see this image below, so what are the settings we need to setup in order for the devices to be detected or booted? 

First is the make it sure that service boot is disabled. 
This is identical to setting up BIOS legacy so it will be compatible to UEFI interface. 



I am using DVD to install Win 8.1 on this laptop, you can use usb device to by selecting USB in boot option. On my end I am going to use DVD. 

So what will happen if your not able to setup your boot option? Tendency is your USB or DVD installer will not be detected by device since this set to UEFI not the old Bios. What we did is something like we enable the system to boot or another term is BIOS LEGACY

But after setting that up another problem appeared, although Acer laptop is able to boot on DVD, error occurs when I do the formatting. Error like,

"windows cannot be installed to this disk the selected disk is of the GPT partition style"


So what does this error means? 
If you boot with a old fashioned BIOS and try to install windows on a GPT partitioned disk then you will get an error. Since UEFI setting is not able to detect or either boot the device, we tried to disable that capability and set it to BIOS LEGACY, the problem is the HARD DRIVES partion cannot be read by our Installer, so WHAT's GPT? 

"GPT is a modern partition table. Contrary NTFS is a filesystem, which is different from a partition table. You can google it for more info. " 

In order for us to install the OS, we need to changed the Partition of your hard drive for the OS to be compatible with the partition table, since we boot in BIOS mode we will partition it using the NTFS. 

See image and command, you need to press SHIFT + F10 to see the command prompt. 






Enter the following commands:
DISKPART
LIST DISK
SELECT DISK #
(Where # is the number you saw in the previous step.)
CLEAN
CONVERT MBR
CREATE PARTITION PRIMARY SIZE=5xxxxx
(The size is in MB, so enter the amount that you want to use for your system partition.)

FORMAT FS NTFS LABEL "SYSTEM" QUICK
After that Installation will continue and GPT partition was converted to NTFS
Warning: COMPLETE HARD DISK WILL BE CONVERTED AND ALL DATA WILL BE LOST.



*If you have some easier tips on how to do this, your comments below are welcome. 
















4 comments:

  1. Except F2 and DEL what is the other key for BIOS ?

    ReplyDelete
  2. what settings should i change to make my usb device detected when im going to boot?

    ReplyDelete
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