Weird one, doing a restore from factory Acer disks, after new hard drive replacement
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Found the solution: The machine’s BIOS has the “SATA Operation” setting in “RAID on” or “AHCI” mode. This setting is good for W7 install and image creation. (And gives the best disk performance if everything is working) But this is not good when restoring the image from the WDS server…
FIX: Put this setting back to ATA in BIOS and do the WDS image load again. Woila, the W7 will mini-install and boot up normaly. After all settings are done, you may download the machine specific AHCI driver and install it. Don’t forget to set back the BIOS setting after you install the AHCI driver BEFORE start the W7 again.