I think my adventures with these machines is set to continue for a while!
The replacement 500GB disk for the 4620 arrived on Saturday, converted to GPT OK, and partitioned and formatted fine in a caddy attached to the W7 m/c, but it was after that, that, earlier today, the trouble started!
The next step was supposed to be to clone the 4620 250GB disk with W10 Pro onto the 500GB disk.
Looked around and found that most of the cloning utils that are supposed to work with W10 (my existing, and very reliable old version of Acronis Disk Director was reputed not to be reliable with W10) were going to cost me rather more than I wanted to pay, but then I came across Partition Wizard as being recommended in the WebUser mag which arrived this morning - so I downloaded that to a flashdrive, stuck on the 4620, loaded it up, figured out the cloning routine from notes on their website, and was working through that when it told me it needed to reboot the m/c to complete the process.
OK, I tell it to do that, and then - very stupidly, it turned out - went away to do some other things because I figured that the restart and cloning process would take some time. Unfortunately, when I came back, the m/c was "Off" and so I tried to restart it, but to no avail as it won't boot to W10 from either the internal disk (although it did appear to do that just
once - so WIN10 does still seem to be on the internal disk - but then reported a problem and gave options on what to do next - and I probably chose the wrong one!) or the external disk, and I can't get into the BIOS to see if the boot order is incorrect, or something else is wrong - just hangs at the ACER flash screen and then, if left, goes to sleep.
At the moment, it's now in bits, and I've re-seated the hard disk on the SATA connector and also the 4GB SODIMM, replaced the heatsink compound (the vendor said he had replaced the fan - but the compound looked rather "used"), disconnected the CMOS battery and shorted the m/b contacts (and ordered a replacement battery which will be here in a couple of days or so), and temporarily moved what looks like the CMOS jumper to what I think is the "clearing" position and then back again. NB: this m/b looks/"feels" more like a notebook m/b than a normal desktop m/b, and so I think it's probably a repackage version of the equivalent notebook one.
Anyone have any other ideas that might be worth pursuing?
Thanks in advance.
PS:
this webpage gives some useful advice on clearing CMOS, but I think I've already tried most of it.
PPS: the machine appears to have originally had W8 Pro factory-installed, and I seem to remember that many vendors offered a retrospective downgrade to W7 Pro.
Therefore, I'd like to know what was involved in actually doing that because I know the W8 Pro Product Key (even though it is now supposed to be at W10 Pro level), and I'm wondering if I could start all over again, install W7 Pro on the 500GB disk (cleaned up first) - using that same Product Key - and then upgrade back to W10 Pro in the same way I did with the N2620 as this might be simpler than trying to sort out the failure to boot from the internal hard disk as I might then be able to get back into the CMOS after a successful OS boot?