M6500 + Intel 310 mSATA: SSD not recognized by BIOS

Hm. Interesting. Well, that's good to know for the future, although we'll probably need someone that has a m310 and is running Windows for extra checking. The fact that the M6500 is going to be obsoleted soon is probably going to make this information of relatively limited use now, though.

 

Hi --

I just put an Intel Series 310 80GB ssd into my M6500. The BIOS did not recognize it so I updated from A04 to A06. The BIOS still is not seeing it. I am running WIndows 7, so once I get this drive visible to my underlying BIOS I can advance the discussion above regarding Windows 7.

But does anybody have any suggestions on what I can do next? My understanding DebGuy is that you are seeing the drive in when you look at the configuration utility on starting up the machine? I believe you said you had replaced your DVD with an extra drive? I also have done this. So I'm thinking that something that has nothing to do with Windows (or any other operating system) is causing me to experience something different from you.

Have I understood this correctly? Any suggestions anybody (I just shelled $180 for this and I want the machine to see it. I'm planning to install OSX on it.)

Thanks for any help anybody can provide.

 

Also, Judicator, what did you mean by the M6500 being obsoleted soon? I love this machine. It's the most stable Firewire music machine I have ever used (once I disabled all but a handful of services and startup applications on startup, that is). I'm even able to use my sequencers (Cubase and Sonar) while still enabling the internet and McAfee. No audio glitches whatsoever. I'm in seventh heaven!

 

The M6600, its successor, is due to come out in a few months. That would make the M6500 "obsolete". As for the missing SSD problem, do you have 2 hard drives occupying both 2.5" bays? And if so, are the 2 of them in RAID, or not?

 

Oh M6000. Well that doesn't make me feel so bad. I never could have gotten a refurbished one of those with a 920 i7 and 8GB memory and two 256GB solid state drives for $2500.

So what I have are the two solid state drives, as well as a third SATA 7200drive where the optical drive used to be. I don't have any RAID set up. But if I understood debguy correctly, he has a very similar configuration, but his BIOS sees the extra drive in the PCIe-mini slot just fine.

I just spent two weeks installing a bunch of software on these drives and getting them set up just the way I want. So I'm reluctant to configure the RAID to see if that makes a difference, as that would force me to reformat them, no? Maybe I will try to find two other drives and put thoise in and configure them as RAID. Or do you think I could just take the other two drives out altogether and possibly have the PCIe-mini as the only one. If that would work, I could at least see if that makes any difference and if the BIOS can recognize the drive by itself. From what you know, is that worth trying?

 

Boy do I feel stupid! Had it in the wrong slot. I had it in the WLAN PCIe-mini slot and not the FCM one. As soon as I switched, the drive now shows up in the BIOS. No RAID.

When Windows 7 booted, a device driver automatically installed for the drive and the Device Manager recognizes it. So Windows 7, at least, does not require the main drives to be under RAID in order to see the PCIe-mini SSD.

I'm psyched. Now I'm all set to do a Hackintosh install. Thanks for your response, Judicator and to you debguy for posting this thread in the first place.

 

Glad you got it straightened out. I guess this confirms that maybe there was an upgrade in the BIOS somewhere down the line that never got mentioned about the drives no longer having to be in RAID.

 

@mclagett:
Nice to hear that you sorted it out!
Welcome to the league of "soon to be obsolete laptops with mSATA SSDs".

Was it a typo when you wrote that you put the SSD into the WLAN slot and you actually meant the WWAN slot? I'm curious because the WLAN slot should be occupied, and even if not the SSD shouldn't fit physically.

 

Thanks debguy for the sentiment. By the way, after doing the Hackintosh thing with OSX, I have intentions to add a Linux boot on one of the partitions of the drive I put into the optical bay. Any advice on what's a good Linux distribution to use? My main use case is extending to Linux a custom virtual-machine-based execution platform I have programmed on top of the Intel chip. I will want this to be able to interface both with Mono and the JVM. And do some music as well with my external Firewire M-Audio device, if feasible (gotta love that TI Firewire chip on the M6500 -- ond of the few machines that has it). Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

And yes, it was a typo; I did mean to say the WWAN slot. This actually occurred to me as I was drifting off to sleep last night shortly after sorting all this out (obsessive compulsive guy that I am).

 

Unfortunately I have no particular recommendation for you.
I could suggest Ubuntu or Mint like many others would do over in the Linux forum because of it's "beginner friendliness". But since this is a pretty vague term and because I've tried nearly everything that's in the desktop Linux sector I think there is no special reason to chose one of these two distributions (maybe except for the good community support due to the wide use of Ubuntu).
I could also suggest Musix or Ubuntu Studio because of their focus on multimedia work, but I found that there is not much special about them except for a more or less useful set of pre-installed software.

If you already have experience with a specific Linux distribution just use this one. Otherwise or in addition to that play a bit with other distributions to see if there's something that you like better.