Problems boot DELL GX620 with ssd hard drive

[lpibed]

Hello,
My DELL computer GX620 will not boot with ssd drive OCZ Agility 3 60 GB. It is possible to read from the drive used as the second drive.

 

[RealBeast]

I'm not sure why you could not use an SSD as a boot drive with that computer, but it should also work as a secondary drive. Did you try to install the SSD as a boot drive with a clean installation and drivers?

 

[lpibed]

I'm not sure why you could not use an SSD as a boot drive with that computer, but it should also work as a secondary drive. Did you try to install the SSD as a boot drive with a clean installation and drivers?

I have tried to boot this ssd as first drive but it did not work ether.
The ssd drive is a clone from the mechanical HDD done in the GHOST program.
It has always worked on other computers. This exat ssd drive has also been used in this way before without any problems. But this DELL optiplex 620 computer stops and a horisontal curser is blinkig and nothing more happens.

 

[RealBeast]

I would not try a cloned SSD from a HDD for Windows XP, I do it all the time with Windows 7 (primarily with Ghost 15), but the two OSs are very different from an SSD friendly perspective. I would download all the latest XP drivers and do a clean installation. There is absolutely no reason that it should not work since you have a SATA 2 Intel port.

Several keys with Windows XP and SSDs is that XP does not properly align the partition so you should use either diskpart or Paragon Alignment Tool. But the easiest thing to do is just attach the drive to a Windows 7 machine and partition the drive from within Disk Management to automatically get a 1024k offset.

Also, it is not nearly as easy to switch from IDE to AHCI mode in XP (although it can be done and I've done it a few times it is a pain compared to Win 7) so make sure that you set it in the bios before starting the install.

Leave a reasonable amount of empty SSD space so that garbage collection can work, as XP is not TRIM capable. I generally use Intel SSDs in XP for the Toolbox, which does manual TRIMs.

 

[lpibed]

Today I have succeed to solv the problem:
I did format the clone again and then run the ghost program again and this time on the DELL computer, which shall use the clone. And surprice !! It worked perfect.
Befor I used one of my HP computers running both the master and the clone to carry out the cloning.
That works normally very good for IDE disks, but for SATA disks it seem to be a bad ide.
Well I am very happy today !! Thank you for your input about the partition problems that was a good clue to success.http://img.tomshardware.com/forum/uk/icones/smilies/hello.gif

 

[RealBeast]

I'm happy to hear that you got it working; while painful you always learn a lot from fixing computer issues.