Brand New AW 17 wont load on SSD

I received my AW 17 today. First thing I want to do is put an SSD boot drive in. I have been working on it for hours with nothing. The second I put the ssd in the bay and hit f2 it reads the drive. The stupid new bios does not allow you to select with drive to boot from so I had to remove the HDD until I can do the fresh install on the SSD. The problem is I check the bios, the SSD is there, the second I try to do a windows load it says there is no hard drive. I have changed from raid to ahci... From legacy to uefi back to legacy nothing. The weirder thing is when I load the bios after every attempt the SSD is no longer visible it has to be reseated. So I throw the HDD back in it boots on the HDD and it reads the SSD fine again. Any help would be nice. It is almost like it is locked by alienware so I cant upgrade...

 

Try reformat the SSD as a GPT if its an MBR or vice versa, through another pc if you can't with the 17. Also try the dell diagnostics after hitting F12, maybe that will tell you if theres a problem with the SDD.

 

What drive are you trying to use as a boot drive? I know the crucial m4 had problems on some of the older firmwares with the Driver disappearing sometimes, but the newer firmwares have seemed to have fixed the problem. I would make sure your firmware is up to date.

 

I am using a Corsair 120 SSD. It makes no sense. I put in main drive it sees until I try to load windows. I have tried alienrespawn and clean install. I put it in bay 2 it does the same thing. The worse part is I put the HDD in bay 2 it still boots from bay 2. Why would they not allow me to select which drive I want my computer to boot from. It never shows in the boot menu though. It worked in my ASUS ROG though. Although that is a windows 7 and the AW is 8. I have done a BIOS flash to the newest. I am just out of ideas. I am pissed about it though.

 

F12 is the Alienware boot menu now. F2 is diagnostics which does nothing. I have no control over any installed piece with this system. I was able to use the SSD in my ASUS ROG so I guess that eliminates the drive as being the issue.

 

In the BIOS you can change the boot order.

 

try hold shift on boot, I think that does something

 

Not in the new bios. You cannot change the boot order.

 

Go over to the "boot" tab on the top and enter legacy boot, you should be able to choose what boots first.

 

The only thing I can think of is the AHCI vs SATA boot settings in the BIOS.

 

You should always use RAID, even if you only have one drive. There's no reason to use the others.

 

Have you checked if it's on RAID?
Secure boot disabled?

 

It's gotta be the SSD, though. Just today I received my AW17 and did the same thing. Took out HDD, put SSD (Samsung 830) in second bay, did nothing to the BIOS, booted off the dvd and installed Windows.

Are you able to borrow another SSD and try booting from that?

 

J is there a performance boost on RAID vs AHCI? I always thought that AHCI was the way to go if you aren't RAIDing since you can disable the RAID check on bootup. Thanks.

 

No, but if you only have one drive in your system, it wouldn't check anyway. RAID just has all the benefits of AHCI, and then more. So, using it makes more sense to me. It's not necessary, though.