AW17 r1 - Move OS from HDD to SSD

hi there,

I got my AW17 R1 from the outlet today and excitement morphed in to frustration very quickly when trying to get the ps moved from the hdd to the SSD.

I created a bootable OS recovery usb but when I restart the laptop and go through the Alienware Respawn process I don't see my SSD there an an option to install to. I kept hitting next thinking "surely it'll give me a choice of drive to install to eventually" but it didn't and so as I type this I'm sitting waiting for it to finish reinstalling the OS to the HDD

Also, this is the first BIOS Where I've never seen the option to change the boot order.

My SSD isn't even showing as an empty drive in My Computer.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

Is it mSata SSD by any chance?

 

Hi there, thanks for replying. No it's not an mSata drive.

The process seems to be working this time now that I've taken the HDD out.

EDIT Yup, got the OS installed on the SSD but there's a few bios things I need to get my head around. The bios for this Laptop is weird. I can't see where I can change the boot order. Just a little annoying that it's checking for other drives as the laptop starts

Do you know how to access these? Cheers!

 

Sounds like a UEFI boot issue maybe. You don't get to select a boot drive with that option but the OS is supposed to see it for an install.

Check the bios and see if there is a compatibility mode rom you can turn on, or you may have to turn UEFI off, install, then turn it back on?

Sorry, not too sure about this stuff, only what I have read.

Edit: Rereading, are you trying to use an original cache drive? The RAID bios hides the drive once a cache is set up. Use the hotkey combo that comes up before the main bios screen enter the disk config to turn the cache off. All should work then.

Good luck.

 

If you are installing Windows 8, legacy should be disabled, uefi enabled, secure boot enabled (or disabled if you prefer), SATA operation should be changed from raid (default) into ahci. All these settings should be changed before starting the installation. Also as MickyD1234 pointed out, you should enter raid configuration with ctrl+i and disable it if raid/cashing is enabled. It should not be the case in your situation unless you have another SSD installed into msata port as they are usually set up as caching drives.

 

Hi thanks for the replies. Got the SSD rocking the OS in AHCI mode and the clunky HDD as a storage drive. So sorted in that respect.

It's the boot order I can't find a solution to. It's not major, just annoying seeing that little delay as it picks the SSD third

 

I've seen that and I messed up trying to fix. I went into disk manager and saw the active partition was on the wrong drive so I moved it to the SSD. It stopped booting and only two run throughs with windows repair (booted from DVD) recovered it.

Hopefully someone knows a better way?

 

UEFI boot devices work in a bit different way than legacy. Your BIOS should look similar to mine:



When you enter UEFI boot menu, all you have to do is move the SSD, which has Windows boot manager written before the drive name to the top.

MickyD1234, could you post a screenshot of your disk manager?

 

I'm not using UEFI any more, I rolled back to win 7. When I was trying it out it was all new stuff and I didn't understand what was going on .

 

Boot manager f12