This latitude E6520 is about to make my head explode!

I'm trying to set up a new latitude E6520 for one of my coworkers. It's brand new and I'm just trying to install a new 128GB SSD. I've tried 3 different softwares for cloning the drive and none of them will work, giving various errors, or producing a drive that simply won't boot for some reason. This should be a simple process but I've wasted hours!

I've also tried a fresh install of the OS and drivers (I have the disks) twice now. The first time everything looked good except there seemed to be ~20GB if missing space on the hard drive, and it started hanging after boot. I'd try to launch a program and I'd get the waiting cursor indefinitely, and it wouldn't even respond to a cntrl-alt-del. So I installed everything fresh again, and it's working fine right now, except it won't let me install the drivers for the sandy bridge integrated graphics. This means I'm running solely on the discrete GPU and optimus is not available. Also, windows aero is not available, when both of those were working on the first install!

With the drives that wouldn't boot properly, I used the windows installation disk to try to repair the install, but it simply wouldn't work. It said repairs were made and to restart the computer, but upon booting I was simply left with a black screen and blinking cursor at the top right indefinitely, both times I tried.

I'm at my wit's end. I don't want to spend 2 hrs on tech support with someone that has no clue, and I feel like banging my head through the LCD at this point.

Any suggestions?

 

I uninstalled the NVIDIA driver and tried to re-install it, and now it's also telling me it can't find proper graphics hardware!!!

 

Did you install the Dell.com device drivers in good proper order after installing the OS?

GK

 

As far as I can tell. I put in the driver cd and installed them in the order they showed up on the installer program.

 

Well, I have no idea what that does. I would use the latest drivers on Dell.com for your system and OS, and install in an order similar to what Dell prescribes in their re-image guide... as noted in my sig for the E6410. The order can be significant up through networking, imo.

GK

 

Errr... pull out the restore disks, use a conventional HDD, then image the conventional HDD onto the SSD?

Not sure what cloning software you're using, but maybe it doesn't like AHCI?

Depending on what software you're using, sometimes you might be forced to clone the entire disk rather than just partitions (especially if the drive had nothing on it to begin with).

 

Paragon has a software that will make this job easy. I'd go there.

 

Intel Graphics must be installed prior to installing NVIDIA.

 

I was wondering about that. I assumed that order, assuming that the Intel chipset, then video drivers should install first.

GK

 

Sounds like the SATA Operation setting in the BIOS might be the issue. What is the current setting? Change it to AHCI if it isn't already.