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Unable to boot windows from Samsung 840

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I have a DELL Inspiron 15R - N5110 and I recently purchased a Samsung 840 120GB SSD. I replaced the optical drive with the new SSD and installed windows 7 on the SSD, via USB. Then when booting, windows wouldn't load. I read up on various things and found out about AHCI, it is however already enabled in the BIOS.

Is there something else I'm missing?
 
You can't use external hard disk as primary drive to boot the PC. But you can use the external drive like USB drive to load the windows.

You have to install the 840 as internal hard disk in the laptop.
 
I think I worded my problem wrongly. Sorry about that :\

The SSD is installed internally. I replaced the internal optical drive with the SSD, placed inside a HDD caddy. I put windows 7 on a USB stick and installed it to the SSD via that. So as it stands, I don't have an optical drive inside my laptop(never used it anyway). I have the SSD and an HDD inside. The HDD is buried like you wouldn't believe so taking that out is not really an option. Plus I will just use that for media storage.
 
Move the SSD to the internal bay and move your HDD to the optical bay. You can probably find instructions on-line. Then make sure bios is set correctly.
 
I really hope there is another way. I have to dismantle the entire laptop to get to the HDD. Could my problem be to do with one drive being Disk 0 & Disk 1?
 
Hmm, that might be the case. Would my issue occur even if there were no other installation of windows? I did deleted the previous windows partition. I just want to be as certain as possible before I take the next steps.

Thanks
 
You said you deleted the previous windows partition. Do you format the HDD already? When you install the win7 with the HDD, then system reserved partition will go to HDD, if in this case you can't boot.

Check there is the 100mb partition in the SSD. If yes maybe something else, if no, you need reinstall the win7 and try disable the HDD in the bios.

Or just take apart the entire laptop and replace with SSD.
 
The SSD shows up in both the BIOS and as a separate drive within windows.

My HDD was partitioned, Windows and apps on one and media on the other. Before installing windows 7 to the SSD I deleted both the windows partition and the 100mb system partition, I did leave the media partition intact though.
 
So...I managed to boot from the SSD, its not straight forward but I'm currently on it so that's a start. Strange thing now is that the 100mb system partition was created on the HDD instead of the SSD. Windows 7 is on the SSD.

@cin19 At the time of asking I did indeed format it.
 
Below is my current drive layout.

2ike2kn.png
 
That is why (referencing the 100mb system partition, you install Windows to the SSD without the HDD installed on most systems. Windows, will be default, instal those files on the primary HDD.

For best performance, you need to install Windows on the SSD with no HDD attached.
 
Is there anyway of forcing windows to put its system partition on the SSD?
I took my laptop apart before getting to where I am and the HDD is under the motherboard, I couldn't for the life of me get the motherboard up.
 
Can you try I said " try disable the HDD in the bios and reinstall the win7 " ? After you disable the hdd ( I am not sure your laptop can or can't), then exit and back to the bios, double check to see the HDD show up in the bios or not.

If you see the hdd, then you have to take apart the laptop and add your SSD.
 
I have idea but it maybe or maybe not work. This is to install the win7 in hdd then cloning it into the SSD.

I saw you have the 97.56 GB unallocated partition, so you can format it and the name it like " Win7" when you format the partition.

Take out the HDD caddy with SSD.

Then install the win7 into this partition, when you load the win7 you can choose the location ( on that 97GB partition) to install. (Make sure don't choose the E: =368GB or if you have other hdd and make a copy )

After done, using the cloning software ( EaseUs http://www.easeus.com/disk-copy/ ) to clone the OS into the SSD, reboot the laptop ( you maybe have two win7 to choose to boot), if you don't know which one just try one by one.


When you boot into the laptop, check the C: = 117.79GB that mean you are in the SSD. Then you can deleted the D: and other drive with the win7, but keep the E:= media

If you see the C:=97GB something, that mean you are in the hdd. You need reboot the laptop by choosing other win7 to boot.

 
Could try this, Back up your media files to an external drive, then Delete all partitions on the HDD, then perform Windows installation on the SSD.
Back of my mind during windows 7 installation, the 100 mb partition is only stuck on the 2nd drive if it has an active partition.
 
Cloning is one option. @Retiredcheif, I was thinking about that too. I think it should work. How about installing my SSD on another laptop? which has an easy to remove HDD(which is 99.9% of laptops.) Then simply placing it back in my laptop. Should that work too?
 
Cloning didn't work, nor did deleting all partitions(windows still created a system partition on the hdd). So I bit the bullet and took the damn thing apart and replaced the hdd with the SSD, which is located under the mother board!!! Now however when going through the process of installing windows. The SSD doesn't even show up as a drive to install too! The hdd is completely remove from the laptop and ahci, or whatever it's called, is set by default in the bios. Oh and the SSD is showing up in the bios and I even done a "ePSA pre-boot system assessment" everything passed.

What else am I missing??

Please help 🙁
 


I'm having the exact same problem with the exact same drive. Try setting the controller to IDE instead of AHCI. It worked for me. I tried to update the firmware on the drive, but it says I have the latest version. This is on a brand new install with Windows 7 Pro 64-bit. No other hard drives are installed. Did the exact same build a couple of months ago with all the exact same components so I know the components work well together. The only thing I changed was the SSD from Crucial to Samsung. It's very frustrating.
 
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