Re: Acer desktop rebuild questions

In message <VA.00000379.00b08dc1@xxxxxxxxxx>, Daniel James <daniel@xxxxxxxxxx> writes
In article <YpAx5ElYBn7NFwHU@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Bill wrote:
I've run HWINFO, which says the GPU is ATI Radeon 200, and the
chipset is ATI RADEON 200/1100/1150.

That's likely to be right ...

On laptops, my impression was that if a machine had ATI display
drivers, it had an ATI chipset and the display drivers contained
everything.

That'd be right if the display is controlled by the main chipset. It's not
uncommon to build a desktop PC with a display controller that's distinct
from the chipset drivers, but in a common-or-garden laptop I'd expect
integrated graphics (so, yes, they'd be the same supplier).

(I'd rather lost sight of the fact that you said this Acer was a laptop)

>Have you checked the nVidia site for a newer driver for the chipset?
>
Yes, but is it nVidia?

I mentioned nVidia because you did. If the main chipset is ATI then maybe
the SATA controller is too ... but that's not inevitably the case.

Have you tried booting from a Linux (Ubuntu, say) Live CD and seeing what
linux makes of the hardware? Its device detection is often very good.

The bios just has an "Enable SATA" option, which is set to enabled. I
don't have any spare sata drive to try.

What's the drive you do have? If that's PATA then the "Enable SATA"
setting probably won't help you. OTOH if its SATA then I should leave that
setting alone as it was obviously working before (maybe by emulating a
PATA drive?)

I've had a quick Google for Acer Power M5 and found very little ... and it
seems that there is a current Acer model with a Core i5 CPU that's also
called M5 (just to avoid confusion)! It's odd that there's so Little
information readily accessible, I wonder whether your M5 was a special
model made for some particular retail channel?

I'm sorry that I've got you as confused as I am. It is a desktop. Nowadays I usually work with laptops so I'm more at home with them and, for example, Acer seem to have utilities for them that are not shown on the desktop sites eg the hardware scanner.

The drives I have are all PATA. Sata is only in the laptops and a couple of drives in the home server. It seems to work with SATA enabled, so I'll leave it like that.

I've been installing Windows 7 on another old drive to test a sound card, and that went OK.

I have a usb stick that boots into Ubuntu 10.10. I made it on a Win7 64-bit machine and it still seems to think it's on that machine. After a while it hangs on this machine.
I have a 10.4 CD, but I don't really know where to look for System Info on Ubuntu. I've had a few goes with that OS, but by the time I get it nearly working right, a new version seems to have come out.

Something does flash up as Linux boots, but I've not yet been fast enough to read it. It's in a tiny font.


--
Bill
.

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