ACPI and Vista

[Guest]

I love how the upgrade advisor makes no mention of needing ACPI being turned
on.
With Windows XP and my ASUS A7N8X motherboard, I had to disable ACPI and
load it as "Standard PC" because I was having IRQ issues. Once I disabled
ACPI I had no more crashes on the PC. So I take a 40GB hard drive and do a
full install of XP. Then Upgrade it to Vista Home Premium to test it out and
it works fine. I pull the 40GB hard drive out and plug my 120GB XP Hard drive
back in. I get a "Bios is not ACPI complaint" error. Everytime I reboot my
computer it says it's ACPI compliant. Considering that on another hard drive
on the same motherboard and BIOS I can install Vista, this error shouldn't
even come up. Instead of checking to see if my copy of Windows XP has ACPI
enabled since I have to launch the upgrade from within XP, it should be
reading my BIOS!
I'm very upset that I'm going to have to consider doing a "repair" of XP or
worse, having to do a fresh install. Some of the programs on this PC are a
few years old and after moving several times, I don't have the keys for all
of the programs anymore. Anyone have any ideas of a workaround?
I remember when I "upgraded" to XP, I lost everything I had on 98SE and
ended up doing a full install. I don't want to go through that again.

 

[Don]

I love how the upgrade advisor makes no mention of needing ACPI being turned
on.
With Windows XP and my ASUS A7N8X motherboard, I had to disable ACPI and
load it as "Standard PC" because I was having IRQ issues. Once I disabled
ACPI I had no more crashes on the PC. So I take a 40GB hard drive and do a
full install of XP. Then Upgrade it to Vista Home Premium to test it out and
it works fine. I pull the 40GB hard drive out and plug my 120GB XP Hard drive
back in. I get a "Bios is not ACPI complaint" error. Everytime I reboot my
computer it says it's ACPI compliant. Considering that on another hard drive
on the same motherboard and BIOS I can install Vista, this error shouldn't
even come up. Instead of checking to see if my copy of Windows XP has ACPI
enabled...

This is a very complicated subject, and I'm not sure I understand
everything you have said, but here are some ideas:

ACPI is 'enabled' not by XP or Vista, but by your BIOS. When I
installed XP for the first time I was surprised that I had to disable
ACPI in my BIOS before XP would install.

If you had ACPI disabled in your BIOS when you first installed XP, you
need to disable it again now before you can boot XP again.

Many BIOS's are full of bugs, including ACPI bugs, so these weird things
are very common (even in very new hardware and new software).

 

[John Barnes]

If you are using two different installs of XP (hard to tell from your post)
you may have different versions of the ACPI driver in each.