Why do I have to re-install Windows 7 OS on my SSD occasionally??? Ugh

[814132506]

Hello all. I had my friend build me a pc about 3 months ago and he said to get an ssd as they are newer technology and way better than the old hdd. I am a novice when it comes to most of the computer jargon but can understand most of the basic concepts. Here's my question........Why do I have to re-install my Windows 7 os back onto my ssd about every month and a half when it seems to just take a dive on me? I have been reading a little bit about ssd trim and wiping and am pretty clueless as to what this means and how to prevent it from doing this in the near future. This is turning out to be a royal pain in the arse and I am thinking about saying the hell with having a ssd to go back and only use a hdd. Tired of having to re-install numerous things. The ssd card is an OCZ Vertex 3 series 120 GB. PLEASE HELP

 

[814132506]

Well...Everything is back to normal on the pc. Guess I'll give this thing a month and see if it acts weird again after having updated the firmware on the ssd, swapping to ahci, and making sure the bios are current. I'm not so worried about the ssd card as much anymore but the motherboard and power supply have me curious. The power supply is 1000w Cooler Master Silent Pro RSA00-AMBAJ3-US ATX12V v2.3 / EPS12V v2.92 SLI Ready 80 PLUS BRONZE Certified Modular Active so it's not a crappy one and is about 200-250w more than I had needed but I wanted to have room for future upgrades.

 

[tekneek]

Yes, the can't-install inssue is because the disk was initialized as GPT. Only motherboards with UEFI, which are rare, can boot from these.

"showing up as primary" probably means that you look in Disk Manager and see that the partitions are "primary partitions." This is fine unless you need more than four partitions on an MBR-formatted drive. Primary and Secondary as terms for disk, like Master and Slave, are obsolete - they referred to the status of two IDE drives on the same cable and did not determine which would boot.

If you have an external drive, you can copy the data from your HDD to it and put it back once you have re-initialized the drive. Or you may have enough free space on the SSD!

Finally, I haven't checked this but you can probably get a DOS-mode firmware updater, and download any number of free DOS-based boot environments that you can burn to a CD. Then you could update the firmware without doing an install that you intend to abandon.

Keep us posted; I'm curious to know what the solution is.

Its a good thing that gpt was used to form your drive as this is the replacement for mbr as it is size limited but gpt is not backward compatible but i wonder how long windows will continue to leave such an important issue in the dark as we are now into bluray disks so i guess i'll hang on to my windows7 untill they allow crossward data flow