Installing Ubuntu 18.04 (1 Viewer)

[Tony Bensley]

Here's a clearer shot (Although the one side prong is still barely visible, due to my flash!) of the coin slot CMOS Battery holder, for what it's worth:

CHEERS!

 

[BobO'Link]

Looks like one of the hold down pins is bent. I'd bet your shop can get the battery back in properly. If not, that putty would likely work as that'll be a tight fit anyway so whatever's above it should apply enough downward pressure to keep the battery in place. Just don't overdo the putty as you don't want to bend the board.

 

[Tony Bensley]

Looks like one of the hold down pins is bent. I'd bet your shop can get the battery back in properly. If not, that putty would likely work as that'll be a tight fit anyway so whatever's above it should apply enough downward pressure to keep the battery in place. Just don't overdo the putty as you don't want to bend the board.

This is the Putty and Ruban Tape that I picked up this afternoon:

I'll probably first try just 1/2 or 1 strip of the Putty to see whether that will be sufficient without using any tape. The idea is to roll it into a ball, working it well until heat from the fingers causes it to soften. I'd imagine a few millimeters in height should be enough.

CHEERS!

 

[Tony Bensley]

OK, I've hit a major snag in regards to CMOS Battery replacement. Namely, the battery keeps popping out. I've posted a snapshot of the coin slot without the battery in it.

View attachment 54853

I tried adjusting the side clasps and bottom prong (As little as possible, so as not to break them, argh!), but unfortunately, when I tried booting my Acer Aspire Laptop, I got the boot failure message, indicating my CMOS Battery did in fact, pop out at some point (Probably early on, after flipping over my Laptop to reinsert the screws!) during reassembly!

Below are the two screens that I currently get when I power on (Apart from the brief Acer Logo appearance!):
View attachment 54854
View attachment 54855

Any idea of what my best options are with my Coin Slot CMOS setup?

While I'm still struggling with keeping the CMOS Battery in place, I just noticed that even with the Battery in place, I STILL get the above screens.

 

[Tony Bensley]

I think that I've finally got the CMOS Battery secured on the back spring happy Coin Slot setup. This has to be the worst f***ing setup going, argh! I ended up putting the putty over the back half of the coin slot and put Scotch tape on top of that. If this doesn't keep the BIOS Battery in place, I'm not sure what will!

CHEERS!

 

[Tony Bensley]

I've got Windows 10 back up!

CHEERS!

 

[Tony Bensley]

And so my Acer Aspire Laptop is now back to sporting Windows 10! No more Ubuntu.

CHEERS!

 

[BobO'Link]

Is that on the original drive or the new one?

 

[Tony Bensley]

Is that on the original drive or the new one?

The original. Unfortunately, it didn't last long, though!

Will try to go into greater depth, later. Suffice it to say I suspect my system may very well be effed up in a big way.

 

[Tony Bensley]

First of all, when defragging with Auslogics, my HD got from 45% to 20% fragmented, before an error caused my PC to shut down. Since then, it's been a series of weird shit stuff, such as being able to get into BIOS, but only via my Windows 10 installation USB; then after changing settings to bring up USB first in the boot order, I am now stuck at the Acer screen, with the spinning dots, never progressing to any other options.

What's causing me all of this misery? A failing motherboard, perhaps? Who knows?

This is the error message I got when I attempted to reformat my clean 60 GB (55.9) hard drive:

 

[Tony Bensley]

OK, I found my solution for MBR to GPT conversion:



Gotta love YouTube tutorials!

CHEERS!

 

[BobO'Link]

OR...

Select "Advance" on the disk partition selection screen. This brings up the menu to allow you to delete any existing partitions.

Delete the partition and let the Windows installer recreate it. Once it's deleted simply select that drive for the install. Windows will create the partition and format it. Since you have UEFI set up it's possible that partition was pre-created for a FAT install and not compatible with the UEFI partition scheme.

 

[Tony Bensley]

OK, I was finally able to perform a clean install of Windows 10 on the previously empty 60 GB Hard Drive. For now, I plan to limit installation of extra programs to a few favorite can't live withouts, as things are running slowly, as it stands; plus I may want to eventually get a higher capacity internal hard drive, which will allow me to go to town on the installation of programs (I'm not fond of calling them apps!), so to speak.

One unsettling anomaly is that even though I was able to access the Acer Aspire BIOS screen via my Windows 10 installation USB setup, I'm STILL unable to do by using the F2 key method. Why this doesn't work as it should, is a total mystery to me.

One silver lining is after an unexpected Windows update, my system did restart with peripheral devices plugged into my USB slots.

The installation of Leawo Blu-ray Player, one of my favorite programs!

CHEERS!

 

[BobO'Link]

On some consumer level BIOS with UEFI you have to use Windows Boot Manager to get into the BIOS - pretty much what you've experienced. I've never run into this. That was a big sticky point early in the life of UEFI BIOS with people who wanted to install something other than a Windows UEFI compliant OS on their systems. I think they've all pretty much given you access without that requirement - I know my latest consumer laptop allows easy, quick, BIOS access outside Windows. It's possible a BIOS update would fix that for you - but it's not something I'd undertake lightly. I normally discourage BIOS updates unless there's something fixed/updated/added you absolutely need.

Big thing is you're back up.

Be aware that an upcoming Windows update will automatically reserve 7GB of drive space for doing updates. At least, so far, Windows 10 has a smaller footprint on the drive and doesn't seem to grow as large over time like Windows 7 (although I still prefer 7).

 

[Tony Bensley]

On some consumer level BIOS with UEFI you have to use Windows Boot Manager to get into the BIOS - pretty much what you've experienced. I've never run into this. That was a big sticky point early in the life of UEFI BIOS with people who wanted to install something other than a Windows UEFI compliant OS on their systems. I think they've all pretty much given you access without that requirement - I know my latest consumer laptop allows easy, quick, BIOS access outside Windows. It's possible a BIOS update would fix that for you - but it's not something I'd undertake lightly. I normally discourage BIOS updates unless there's something fixed/updated/added you absolutely need.

Big thing is you're back up.

Be aware that an upcoming Windows update will automatically reserve 7GB of drive space for doing updates. At least, so far, Windows 10 has a smaller footprint on the drive and doesn't seem to grow as large over time like Windows 7 (although I still prefer 7).

On the plus side, I was pleasantly surprised at how a relatively low amount of space was taken up by the full Windows 10 Installation this time around. While I've never used Windows 7, I do recall it taking up over 20 GB of hard drive space on our son's Laptop.

Provided nothing serious goes awry with my current setup, I would like to eventually get a 1 TB SATA hard drive to replace the 60 GB HD that I'm currently using. This is the smallest main C drive that I've had for my main PC in almost 15 years, which I think is making a difference, in terms of overall operations being sluggish. Of course, having only 6 GB of RAM might also be a contributing factor.

CHEERS!

 

[BobO'Link]

On the plus side, I was pleasantly surprised at how a relatively low amount of space was taken up by the full Windows 10 Installation this time around. While I've never used Windows 7, I do recall it taking up over 20 GB of hard drive space on our son's Laptop.

Provided nothing serious goes awry with my current setup, I would like to eventually get a 1 TB SATA hard drive to replace the 60 GB HD that I'm currently using. This is the smallest main C drive that I've had for my main PC in almost 15 years, which I think is making a difference, in terms of overall operations being sluggish. Of course, having only 6 GB of RAM might also be a contributing factor.

CHEERS!

Windows 10 runs just fine with 6GB RAM - far better than Win7 on the same amount. I'm sure it's the drive making things slow. A 60GB drive will be older technology and have a slower throughput than newer drives. Just switching to an SSD will make worlds of difference.

I don't know that I'd go with 1TB, even if it's your only internal drive. 256GB is far more than you'll likely need internally and then keep your data on an external drive (actually 2 or 3 for redundancy). Even if you do keep current files locally for ease of access, use external drives for backups. If you *do* go with a 1TB internal drive I highly recommend partitioning it with Windows and program installations getting ~256GB and the rest as a separate data partition. That makes for easier backups and makes reinstalling the OS almost painless as you don't have to worry about your data - as long as you don't delete the data partition during setup.

 

[Tony Bensley]

Windows 10 runs just fine with 6GB RAM - far better than Win7 on the same amount. I'm sure it's the drive making things slow. A 60GB drive will be older technology and have a slower throughput than newer drives. Just switching to an SSD will make worlds of difference.

I don't know that I'd go with 1TB, even if it's your only internal drive. 256GB is far more than you'll likely need internally and then keep your data on an external drive (actually 2 or 3 for redundancy). Even if you do keep current files locally for ease of access, use external drives for backups. If you *do* go with a 1TB internal drive I highly recommend partitioning it with Windows and program installations getting ~256GB and the rest as a separate data partition. That makes for easier backups and makes reinstalling the OS almost painless as you don't have to worry about your data - as long as you don't delete the data partition during setup.

I definitely want at least a 500 GB internal hard drive, and I do like your idea of separate partitioning for Windows 10 and data storage. The difference in cost between 500 GB and 1 TB drives on amazon.ca don't appear astronomical, so I'm just as likely to go with the latter. Hopefully, I can save up enough by my birthday to treat myself!

CHEERS!