[ogodihaveproblems]

Hi. so here is the story. bought laptop in late 07 its an acer travelmate 7720 about a year ago it crashed. so a friend told me to try installing another windows so i did. it worked but i had two OS on it.. new and old one. so it woked for about 11 months then crashed again and said no operating system found. . so i went out and bought a new hard drive and wanted to start fresh.
but it would load up from the disk go to install windows xp and stop and say can not found hard drive disk.... so what i was told was to slipstream using nlite or whatever. so i downloaded all the drivers with this other computer put them in made a new iso and burnt it to a disk and went to try it.. and i get ahcix64.sys not found...please someone help me with this because its driving me nuts.

[craig5320]

Have you tried just wiping the original hard drive and installing to that? If you can get it to work and still want to use the newer drive then at least you know the method works. It could be needing drivers during install or something.

[Tipstaff]

Given that it's XP the best option (and easiest) would be to go into the laptops bios, and change the hard drive controller to IDE mode (or PATA). There will be a slight drop in transfer speeds, but depending on the speed of the hard drive you might not notice it.

Otherwise you'll have to go through nLite again to see what went wrong with the slipstreaming. It could be that you got the wrong driver, and in fact if I read it right it looks like you've slipstreamed in the 64bit AHCI driver, which if this is XP 32bit, the installer would come up with that ahcix64.sys error.

Edit: If I remember correctly the 7720 is an Intel based laptop, so you will want to grab their driver for it. Since Acer is useless (and Intels own site too at the moment) go to HP's site HERE, and download the file. Extract it using 7zip or WinRAR to a folder, or run the file which will do the same thing although when it finishes extracting don't install it. Go into the extracted folder, and you will see a folder inside called "Files". Inside there are all the files you need to slipstream.

[ogodihaveproblems]

ok so i did that put it on nlite. and it comes up with a list of controllers. they are all intel(R) but you get ones like ICH9 SATA AHCIController (desktop ICH9R) .. or 82801HEM SATA RAID controller (Mobile ICH8m-e) thats two out of around ten that came up.. do i need one. or all of them.. and if one.. what one lol

[Tipstaff]

Try the one that says, "Intel(R) 82801HEM/HBM SATA AHCI Controller" first. This is the one for ICH8, which "should" be the hard drive controller in your laptop. If it doesn't work try either the listing above it, "Intel(R) 82801HR/HH/HO SATA AHCI Controller" as this is also for ICH8 (ICH8R in fact), or the one below it, "Intel(R) ICH9 SATA AHCI Controller" as I think some of the later versions of that laptop used that controller instead.

Edit: If none of those work try the one listed as, "Intel(R) 82801GBM SATA AHCI Controller". It's very possible that the laptop is using an even older controller, ICH7, and that is the listing for that controller. In any case it won't hurt the system to try each out, just that it will take time as you might have to restart the process over each time it fails.

[ogodihaveproblems]

so when i put it on nlite do i leave it at txt mode or should it be on pnp?

[ogodihaveproblems]

Hey soo i ended up getting my hands on a copy of windows xp in 64bit.. and i downloaded the drivers and well i have the computer set up and it works! but i dont have sound or a way to get on the internet. and well. probably alot more lol. soo yeah any ideas on that

[ogodihaveproblems]

i went into the system and device manager and some of the drivers have a yellow (?) and a smaller one of these (!) .. so im not to sure what to do about it.

[Tipstaff]

64bit XP was probably a bad idea. While finding drivers for 32bit XP is fairly easy (very easy for that laptop in fact) for a laptop of that age finding 64bit drivers may take a bit, and maybe not at all in a couple cases.

In any case you need to find the drivers for it, and that means hunting them down. That, or grab some sort of application that is capable of searching for drivers for you, or some sort of drivers collection pack, such as DriverPack Solution, a program which incorporates a collection of drivers provided by DriverPacks.net.

[Judas]

i know the 7720 support windows vista/win7 x64.... well at least everything excluding the webcam if you the model with one.. almost all of them seem to though.

win7 seems to include working camera driver where as win vista doesn't appear to...

I sold about 6 of the acer 7720's.... yup using the intel ICH8 AHCI mode.

Now it's becoming more and more difficult to get windows xp to work flawlessly specially now that driver support is falling like a rock.

But downloading the latest F6 Rapid Storage Technology Driver package and extracting it to a usb flash drive.... should allow it to find the correct driver when you install windows xp and make certain to push F6 repeatedly so that you can pick the necessary driver.

But default win vista/7 both have a generic driver.. which i've found is best to let windows use that driver to install.. and then when your in windows... just run the iata intel driver package installer (latest).. and it'll install all the latest goodies.

Keep in mind.. if your having frequent issues even with a new drive.. there is a remote possibility that the hardrive controller in the laptop may be faulty/failing.... i've had 3 laptops... it's a rare thing.. that would just randomly corrupt or fail to do the read/writes properly resulting in most of the hardrives data left in tact, but the boot manager and system directories would just fowl up... only way to get those machines to work longterm was to use a USB drive to boot from... obviously not the best solution. Customers ended up replacing them as of course.. warranty had expired.

[ogodihaveproblems]

hey. so i got the sound and the internet to work .. using it right now! lol but there are still some that dont work . like the mass storage controller. and a few others.. Yes this is the acer with the crystal eye. would you have a link to where i could find these drivers? because i cant just update them seeing how i tried that on the spot.

[ogodihaveproblems]

here is a list of the drivers it says i do not have

Ethernet controller
Fingerprint sensor
Mass storage controller
modem device on high definition audio bus
Sm bus controller

and that is all.

[Tipstaff]

Ethernet should be Broadcom, fingerprint reader is most likely Authentec. As for the modem, the bulk of what Acer used was either Agere or Connexant. Mass storage controller might be the card reader which is from Texas Instruments, and the SMBus driver is usually taken care of with the (Intel) chipset driver.

The best thing you can do to help us help you is to post the device IDs for all the devices. Go into Device Manager, click on an item, hit the Details tab, and change the listing to "Hardware IDs". Make note of each one, and list them here like this:

Ethernet - VEN_xxxx&DEV_xxxx

so, for instance:

Ethernet - VEN_10EC&DEV_8168 (this is my listing for Realtek GBE)

You could also take a look via Google for them too.

[ogodihaveproblems]

ethernet controller.( ven_14E4&dev_1693&CC_0200 )
fingerprint sensor (USB\VID_08FF&PID_1600\5&454ACDD&0&2)
mass storage (PCI\VEN_104C&DEV_803B&SUBSYS_011F1025&REV_00\4&3B 3A03B5&0&32F0)
modem device on high definition audio bus ( HDAUDIO\FUNC_02&VEN_14F1&DEV_2C06&SUBSYS_10250093& REV_1000\4&235BFFD7&0&0102)
and last is
Sm bus controller (PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_283E&SUBSYS_011F1025&REV_03\3&B1 BFB68&0&FB)

hope this helps!

[Tipstaff]

I'll post these as I find them:

Ethernet - Broadcom BCM5757 - You can get that right HERE on Broadcoms site.

Mass Storage - Texas Instruments 5 in 1 Card reader - HERE from Acer's site.

SMBus - Intel Series 4 Chipset / IO Controller (most likely SATA) - Get that HERE.

Finger Print Reader - Authentec - THIS driver from HP includes both 32bit and 64bit.

Modem - Conexant / Agere - Give THIS driver a shot first. If that doesn't work try THIS one from Dell (note: it's a much larger file to download).

Let me know if you have any problems, as well if it works out.

[ogodihaveproblems]

the ethernet one was the only one i couldnt figure ot lol almost like there was no set up tab. but all the rest of them. worked ! life saver buddy. thanks for them! so im down just to the ethernet one. and then i wont have anymore to install!

[Tipstaff]

I see. Looks like you will need to manually update/install the driver.

Device Manager | Ethernet | Driver tab | Update Driver button | "Install from a list.." option | check off "Search removeable media" and check on "Include this location.." | browse to the folder with the driver, then hit next. It should find the driver for it. If not:

Device Manager | Ethernet | Driver tab | Update Driver button | "Install from a list.." option | "Don't search..." option | Have Disc | point it to the folder for the driver | choose one to install, which should be Broadcom NetXtreme 57xx Gigabit Controller, but I can't be 100% that is the listing. You want anything that says Broadcom NetXtreme Gigabit Ethernet NOTHING that says "Fast" or "10/100" (they are both the same), or "Fiber".

Glad to hear the rest worked out for you.

Edit: I take it wireless is working? If so you could try to run Windows Update from the actual Microsoft site. Choose to do a "Custom" update, and if the site sees the hardware there might be an update offered by the site for the Ethernet, and probably any of the other drivers that might be old (it will show up on the left side under the "Hardware" listing on the menu).

[ogodihaveproblems]

the first thing worked.. thanks alot guy! no more yellow question marks ! couldnt have done this with out some help!