Installing SSD, making it bootable...

I am probably going to spend the rest of the night researching this so that I do not screw it up. Any advice?

SSD:
Corsair Force F240 SSD, I also have a Seagate Momentus XT coming next week to use as the 2nd drive.

First a couple questions
Q1) Can I install the SSD in the spare drive bay, install Windows 7 and still access the 320GB that came with my M17x R2?

Q2) Would I get to choose to boot off of either drive?

Q3) I have read about aligning the SSD, what does this mean, should I do it, if so what size do I align it?

Q4) Any other tips for the SSD before I proceed, both regarding installation of it and Win7 as well as post-installation advice?

Steps
1) Create bootable Win7 CD:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/win...-7-download-links-just-like-vista-before.html (done)

2) Find the Win7 key that came with my M17x R2 (I assume I need to find it with the stuff packed with my M17x, any way to pull it directly off of my laptop?)

3) Backup drivers from M17x to thumb drive (where can I find them? any tools I can download to help facilitate this?)

4) Backup registry to thumb drive; maybe not necessary, but just want to be extra careful, I was going to use regedit - File > Export (best way, good enough?)

5) Take off back panel, install SSD

6) Install Win7 from CD

7) Install Drivers

8) ?

 

for working with a SSD use the windows setup disk and get into command prompt and use "diskpart" to partition and format the drive. if you use windows installer it will make you use a 100mb partition for system space.

read this guide otherwise windows will take up like 15-20gb of space. I have my windows 7 install with drivers at 5.8gb and 5.13 before drivers

http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m15x/516410-windows-7-optimized-ssd-install-5-5gb.html

you can download all the latest drivers from dell alienware website just input your system tag and it will show you. DO NOT USE DRIVERS DISK most of them are old and m15x was bricking by installing command center on the dvd since it was an old version. To the bios update as well to fix throttling.

 

Q1) Can I install the SSD in the spare drive bay, install Windows 7 and still access the 320GB that came with my M17x R2?

Yes you can but your boot drive will still be your hard drive which defeats the purpose of having an SSD.

Q2) Would I get to choose to boot off of either drive?

I cant answer this and you may be able to go into bios and switch the boot drive as you can with desktops.

Q3) I have read about aligning the SSD, what does this mean, should I do it, if so what size do I align it?

If you are using Win7 do not concern yourself with this at all.

Q4) Any other tips for the SSD before I proceed, both regarding installation of it and Win7 as well as post-installation advice?

Read up on SSD optimizations because they will be a valuable tool on, not only ensuring that your ssd is in top shape, but also they can save you a great deal of valuable ssd storage space.

 

Ok, so it is installed, I followed these very good directions which only used a 1024kb offset:

If you want to install Win7 without the 100MB partition, it's fairly easy to do. On a raw, unpartitioned drive, Win7 will automatically create and align this partition. It annoys me because I like my imaging software which can't read the 100mb partition.

After booting to the Win7 installation DVD... click on repair computer and go to the command prompt.

Run diskpart by typing "diskpart" and waiting for the program to load. It takes a moment.

"list disk" will show you what drives you have installed. During a Win7 installation, it's highly recommended that you only have the OS drive installed.

"select disk #" and it will tell you that it's selected.

"clean" will remove all info from the drive regarding partitioning or previous raid information.

"create partition primary" will create 1 partition on the drive and automatically align it to the microsoft Vista default of 1024kb, which is great.

"active" makes the drive bootable

"assign" will give it a drive letter. Usually C.

"list volume" will show you the drive letter.

"exit" will exit the program.

that takes you back to the command prompt. Click the X at the top right until you are back at the "Install Windows 7" window, at which time you can start the new installation.

When you get to the window regarding which drive to install to, do not delete the partition you just created. Simply highlight it and click the "format" button. When done, begin installation.

Now you have a Win7 installation without that unnecessary 100MB partition.

 

My WES is only 5.9 though, which is HDD restricted. The only thing I can think of is that I removed the Pagefile (set it to 0), I have 8 GB of memory and from what I understand about how the Pagefile works I should be fine so long as I don't run out of memory in any of my applications.

Anything I can do to bring this number up, or should I just ignore it?

ETA: So bizarre...so I have run it about 3 times, each time the subscore for HDD was 5.9, I decided to run it again and now it is showing as 7.5, lol.

 

Here is my HD Tune report (reads, default settings):
http://img80.imageshack.us/img80/9134/readf.jpg

Here is another one, this one makes me feel a little better:
http://img687.imageshack.us/img687/5007/11september20101119.png

 

Your Windows key should be on a sticker on the bottom of your laptop. If you try looking for it in all of the documentation/discs/etc you won't find it