Dell Precision M4600 transfer Windows from included HD to SSD

Ok Im still in the process of installing win on the SSD by the way should I install drivers before I put the HDD back in or I can do it later aswell ?

 

One more thing should I set AHCI in bios instead of RAID on ?

 

Installed on the SSD finally working iv put back the HDD and Iv set the boot sequence so that is working as well now but when I get into Win there is no 500gb HDD it didnt recognized it

 

Myb it is the AHCI which is preventing the HDD to be seen or am I wrong? Iv enabled AHCI in SATA Operation some time before, should I put it back to RAID On now even if the OS is on the SSD now?

 

Ok lol sorry for the spam I got the HDD to work as well now the only thing that keeps bugging me is this System Reserved disk E which was created during the install of Win on the SSD it has 99.9MBs of which 71.8 are free... Any1 has this system Reserved disk as well or its only me?

 

Mine has the 100mb system reserved space, I would have preferred not to have it at all but as far as I know it's one of the things Win 7 does automatically, not sure what it's for, probably boot ini or something along those lines, it's only 100mb, but yeah, typical of windows 7's take...take...take MO

 

OK so I have installed all the drivers but I still got one yellow question mark in the device manager it is the Broadcom USH ( vendor ID 0A5C and product ID 5800 ) can any1 help me with this problem and tell me where to get the drivers couse I cant find em on the dell site...

 

I did not read the whole treat, here is my expirience:

At first I tried to make a fresh reinstall of Win 7. But I was not able to restore the old state (e.g.: I did not get the gestures on the touchpad working.)
So I decided to clone the partition from the hdd to the ssd.

Because I have an Intel ssd it was quite easy as there is an tool from Intel. It's called Intel migrate.
BUT: It misaligned the parition. Shame on Intel!

So I moved it with a bootable usb stick with gparted live.
Than Windows did not boot anymore, so I had to repair the installation. But after this it finally worked!

 

I haven't transferred Windows 7 on an M4600, but I did have to do it for my ASUS UL20FT since the provided disks were recovery disks which wanted to load a ~20GB hidden recovery partition image onto a 60GB SSD. o.o

What I can tell you is:
- Partition to partition copy won't work unless you do a regular install to it then partition-copy it. It does something more than just an FDISK /MBR since that didn't work in recovery mode either.
- Mind the alignment. If the target partition is aligned initially, it generally should stay aligned.
- The 100MB reserved partition is part of any Windows 7 Pro and up. Home doesn't put it in but it won't hurt anything. Whether Pro will work or not without it is another story.
- In some cases, there is a big enough of a differentiation between AHCI and RAID to the Windows drivers that Windows will BSOD on startup if you change the BIOS setting (particularly if you're using the Intel-specific ones). Without changing the driver under Windows, it will no longer see the startup volume when the drivers initialize and then restarts the PC.
- Should boot under IDE mode no matter what.
- After imaging, you should check if anything like indexing or defrag are still scheduled/enabled. If they are, you will want to disable it before it wrecks/wears your SSD.

 

Someone I know purchased an M6600 and had the same thing happen. He expected to be able to use the computer out of the box with the SSD as the primary drive, but he had to reinstall the OS and drivers. On top of that, the unit was not built with the options he ordered so it had to be replaced, resulting in him having to reinstall the OS and drivers twice.

Dell really needs to work on this. If someone orders a unit with multiple drives, it should be possible for them to select the SSD as the primary drive and it should not be necessary for them to do a complete reinstall of the OS in order to have the SSD as the primary drive. Or at least if this cannot be an option, the reinstallation process should be made simpler so users don't have to deal with issues like the ones noted below in this thread (e.g., ControlVault).