Acer Aspire 7740G boot problem

[nhillson]

I recently took it upon myself to switch out my laptop's (Acer Aspire 7740G) DVD drive for a hard drive. I had previously replaced the 640GB WD scorpio blue it came with with a 100GB OCZ Vertex LE SSD, and had been using the hard drive in an external USB enclosure. I bought a simple caddy to put the hard drive in to replace the DVD drive and installed it.
When I try to boot with the hard drive caddy in, the computer will recognize the two hard drives and the mouse, then go to a black screen and do nothing. If I press F2 (which usually accesses the BIOS), it will keep the text on the screen but still do nothing. If I press F10 (which usually accesses the boot order menu), the same thing happens.
If I remove the hard drive caddy, the laptop boots just fine and acts perfectly normally.
Also, I know that the hard drive is working because it still works in the external USB enclosure.

Could it be that the laptop just won't allow a hard drive to replace the DVD drive? Or do I have to do some magic in the BIOS?
Any help is appreciated.

 

[denis280]

in bios your dvd drive is set to boot first thats wy.

 

[udi]

I have exactly the same problem on the same notebook.

in bios your dvd drive is set to boot first thats wy.

This advice does not help.
Have you any idea what to do?

 

[Bubbaleone]

Is Windows 7 still installed on the HDD? If, for example, it was previously installed and you simply deleted it, the hidden 100 Mb partition containing the MBR and boot loader (among other things) is still there. If that's the case, low-level formatting the HDD should fix the problem.

.

 

[udi]

Thank you, but it did not help. I deleted all partitions from the hard drive but no results.

When I try to boot with the hard drive caddy in, the computer will recognize the two hard drives and the mouse, then go to a black screen and do nothing. If I press F2 (which usually accesses the BIOS), it will keep the text on the screen but still do nothing. If I press F10 (which usually accesses the boot order menu), the same thing happens.

Exactly the same symptoms.
More ideas?

 

[udi]

I did a little experiment - put the caddy in the laptop while running Windows. The device has been identified, the drivers were installed. I checked the read and write - and it works. So, caddy works. But after a reboot - black screen again, the symptoms repeat.
I do not know what to do next.

 

[udi]

Problem solved by flashing the BIOS to version 1.27.

 

[d4life11]

Problem solved by flashing the BIOS to version 1.27.

Hello Udi can you please tell me how did you flash to version 1.27 as I have the same issue as yours with my acer aspire 7740g, I have already downloaded the BIOS file from Acer support website, selected the DOS folder, from there I can see 3 files

1. ACERACDC.EXE
2. JV70127.WPH
3. phlash16.exe

Can you please tell me how you proceeded

Thank you