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Sunday, May 22, 2016

Gateway Freezes when Installing Windows 7...

Gateway is a perfect company to make an example of to show what Bad Management looks like...

Gateway was out as fast as they were in and they had everything going for them...

Great Marketing, Great Techs, Response Ready and Friendly Tech Support, so how does such a good thing fail...

Companies stay small for three reasons:

1. They provide a service that no one else can do and the secret is never let out...
2. They refuse to grow and insist on keeping the one on one with their customers...
3. They make bad choices...

Gateway made bad choices by not entering into the Enterprise and Portable Market which took a multi billion dollar company and reduced it to mere pennies when they finally sold out to Acer...

One of the best purchases Acer probably ever made and still today you can download drivers for Gateway systems which is a God Send, when you have a system like the one we were working on...

sidenote: If Carly Fiorina could of taken a page out of that playbook, her Compaq purchase wouldn't have been such a failure ;-)

We are working on a Gateway DX4870 Tower and came across an interesting problem that we haven't dealt with in awhile which is the inability to boot from any device other than the original hard drive that it came with...

We wanted to restore to factory settings, but we needed to preserve the original drive for data reasons, so we tried to boot from our cloning software and it gave us the error: "Reboot and Select proper Boot Device or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device and press a key"...

Then we decided to just load Windows 7 on the new drive and just upgrade to Windows 10, but it just kept freezing when trying to load the install...

We're glad it didn't work because it would have meant sacrificing a license for just an install problem which we weren't too motivated to do, but sometimes you gotta do whacha' gotta do...

We changed DVD drives, with no prevail, changed media, no luck and were about to just clone the drive on a Clone PC and call it a day, but this would require more labor, so we thought...

The problem had to be in BIOS, but we knew upgrading the BIOS wasn't the solution and that it had to be something else and finally we found it and it was so simple...

sidenote: Of course after a few hours of troubleshooting :-D

Like we've said before, some of the easiest solutions are staring at you right in the face, you just gotta look in the right places...

Solution: At boot up press the Delete Key to enter into BIOS and go to Authentication and Disable Secure Boot, now go to Boot Options and Enable "Launch CSM" (Compatibility Support Module), basically means Launch Legacy Software...

"Secure boot defines how platform firmware manages security certificates, validation of firmware, and a definition of the interface (protocol) between firmware and the operating system. Secure boot prevents “unauthorized” operating systems and software from loading during the startup process"

By Default the BIOS is set to UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) See Images below:

From what we read Secure Boot and UEFI was implemented with Windows 8...


Before:



After: 

 

...and that's all folks, Happy Computing and remember to Love the Process 'cause if you don't, you're in the wrong line of work...and that's a fact!

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