Just bought a WD20EARS 2TB internal drive and am attempting to replace the boot drive on an older Acer M1610 desktop. I have installed Vista 32 bit onto it but there are booting problems. (Doesn’t boot) I’ve used the Acer recovery CDs to re-install the Vista.
I alst tried installing Windows 7 and also have booting problems.
The BIOS shows a 2TB drive so it does at least report the proper size.
Wondering if there’s any possibility that the SATA built-in might not have enough addressing to be compatible with this drive, in which case maybe an add-on PCI SATA card would help. The BIOS is the most recent version.
The old boot drive is going out so I need to boot this drive. I would like to keep it all one partition.
Might I need to do anything else to get compatibility?
The WD20EARS is 3GB/s, which would make it SATA-2… I think. So I’m not sure that’s an issue since I think the SATA on the motherboard is SATA-2.
We actually replaced the power supply to a 500W almost day one to prevent power issues, so I’m not sure that would be a problem either.
Also, the drive is rated as a formatted capacity of 2,000,398Mb, below the upper limit of the 2TB addressing, so I’m not sure the other information relates.
I’ll continue to experiment. Even if I clone the smaller drive (500GB) that has tripped the SMART onto the 2TB drive, the clone does not boot properly. The actual computer hardware (i.e. Motherboard) seems fine. The system actually works with no issues using the smaller drive, even though the SMART has tripped. So time will tell if I can get this working. I know Acer does some things to MBR/partitioning that may add a variable. Just not too sure why the clone would not work properly, keeping existing smaller partitions, with a bunch of unused area on the new drive.
