Question Replacing HDD with an SSD

[jimr1354]

My kid has a small laptop an HP Mini 1000. He came to me and said something is wrong with it. It has a 1.8, 80GB HDD with a ZIF conn and a small short cable that plugs into another ZIF conn on the motherboard. I bought a mini Msata pci-e adapter board and a 128gb mSata m3 SSD that plugs into the adapter. Put it all together and everything was working ok. We loaded Win 10 on it and half way through it said can't find the boot file. We tried loading Win 7 on it and it did the same thing. One of his buddies has a similar laptop with the same setup and it works fine. Could it be the SSD board is bad? I have another one that is only 32Gb but the ZIF conn and cable comes out the side and it doesn't need an adapter, but there isn't enough room in the laptop for a correct fit.

 

[dwd999]

My kid has a small laptop an HP Mini 1000. He came to me and said something is wrong with it. It has a 1.8, 80GB HDD with a ZIF conn and a small short cable that plugs into another ZIF conn on the motherboard. I bought a mini Msata pci-e adapter board and a 128gb mSata m3 SSD that plugs into the adapter. Put it all together and everything was working ok. We loaded Win 10 on it and half way through it said can't find the boot file. We tried loading Win 7 on it and it did the same thing. One of his buddies has a similar laptop with the same setup and it works fine. Could it be the SSD board is bad? I have another one that is only 32Gb but the ZIF conn and cable comes out the side and it doesn't need an adapter, but there isn't enough room in the laptop for a correct fit.

Did you have only 1 drive the ssd connected during the windows install process? The windows installer has real problems if there is more than 1 drive connected. You can connect additional drives after installation is complete.

 

[USAFRet]

We loaded Win 10 on it and half way through it said can't find the boot file.

How did you do this?
Details, please.

 

[jimr1354]

Did you have only 1 drive the ssd connected during the windows install process? The windows installer has real problems if there is more than 1 drive connected. You can connect additional drives after installation is complete.

There isn't much room in the laptop for anything else. Its a Latitude E6420. So yes, there is only the one drive.

 

[rcald2000]

Hello jimr1354. I have no experience with the Dell Latitude E6420. However, when I google'd your problem, came across this forum post excerpt:

the problem turned out to be that the pins on the HDD were not making contact with the pins to the motherboard. When I put the Latitude 6420 back together, i did not tightened the screws that held the HDD in place tight enough.

Basically, I tightened the 4 screws that hold the HDD very tight; started the computer and everything was working normally. Hope this helps.

Latitude E6420 won't recognize hard drive (last response located at the very bottom of the page)
https://www.dell.com/community/Latitude/Latitude-E6420-won-t-recognize-hard-drive/td-p/7910043

Google query: latitude e6420 new drive can't find boot