Had a frustrating few hours yesterday with a Del 755, trying to get a Win7 installation to boot. I finally tracked it down (I hope!) to a BIOS setting for selecting between AHCI and ATA on the SATA Operation setting. The motherboard battery had run low, and seemingly had lost this setting, reverted from the ATA option to the AHCI option.
I have a few 755s, and the one that had the issues has a dual boot Win7/Zorin Linux installation on it. It would boot Zorin, but when trying to boot Win7, it would get as far as the 4 coloured balls coming together, then freeze, and reboot, etc. A Win7 installation from another 755 transplanted to this troublesome 755 would give the same issue. Both OSs on the Win7/Zorin HDD would boot fine in another 755 without issue. So by going through the BIOS settings, I was able to find the AHCI / ATA setting that was messing things up.
But I still can't understand why the setting AHCI would give any issues for the Win7 installations. From what I've read since, Win7 should have no problems dealing with AHCI. Is there some setting in Win7 that needs to be set to allow the OS to boot with the AHCI enabled in the BIOS?
I have a few 755s, and the one that had the issues has a dual boot Win7/Zorin Linux installation on it. It would boot Zorin, but when trying to boot Win7, it would get as far as the 4 coloured balls coming together, then freeze, and reboot, etc. A Win7 installation from another 755 transplanted to this troublesome 755 would give the same issue. Both OSs on the Win7/Zorin HDD would boot fine in another 755 without issue. So by going through the BIOS settings, I was able to find the AHCI / ATA setting that was messing things up.
But I still can't understand why the setting AHCI would give any issues for the Win7 installations. From what I've read since, Win7 should have no problems dealing with AHCI. Is there some setting in Win7 that needs to be set to allow the OS to boot with the AHCI enabled in the BIOS?
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