Problems when installing SSD, help!

It says it all in the title xD, got my m17x today (well yesterday technically) and I plan on replacing the 320gb HDD that it came with by a Kingston SSD 128GB with a clean install of a DIFFERENT windows 7 than in original HDD. (from 320gb 7200rpm win7 home, to 128gb SSD win7 pro).

I tried once but it lead to problems (no drivers or hardly any installed on laptop not even for wifi.), a weird message would prompt in the beginning of the start up but would not last, it would ask me to press ctrl + i to set up some sort of rapid storage technology xD and create a RAID thingy... (I start to understand this is a key process that I skipped when installing windows...) eventually I got a BSOD while installing windows updates and drivers which lead me to start again from scratch (I formatted the SSD and am now waiting on/searching for advices as to what is needed to be done.)

All I need to know is how to get my SSD to be set up in a way where I can just put the win7 DVD in and install so that all goes well. Thanks every body for reading, and perhaps helping

EDIT: Problem solved, solution is found here:

Side note, to reverse to original non-SSD drive (Which was installed on a RAID status most likely, or whatever it was before you set AHCI in BIOS) You will need to go in BIOS again to put the original SATA OPERATION back in place then boot the laptop.
In BIOS don't forget to put the correct hard drive to boot the laptop (If like me and a couple others, you installed SSD in port 1, you'll need to put the secondary drive on top of the list)

Then proceed to the SSD tweaks. Install the drivers FROM RESSOURCE CD or DELL WEBSITE. Though I am not sure at 100%, but installing drivers from device manager would always result in BSOD in my case starting from the first wave (92 updates) of windows update.
Except for wifi, which the ressource cd didn't have, and I had no computer with internet on at that time, install everything from ressource cd up until wifi, (or ethernet if you don't use wifi) then get latest updates at DELL support .

The Revelator has a nice post in "Boot time again!", here it is:

On a side note though I am not as pro as he is I also chose to not do point 6, 9, 10.

 

Just insert the installation DVD, set the bios to load the DVD first and follow the instructions to install the OS, SSDs need to be aligned but Win7 will do that by itself on a fresh install.
As for the drivers and all of that, the system should've come with a resource disk with all the updated drivers to the moment of production, but you can refer to dell's site as well to download them, you can refer to NVidia's or AMD's sites as well for GPU drivers.

 

Go to BIOS and change RAID to AHCI. Install SSD in port 1.

Boot of Windows 7 disk and format the SSD and procceed to follow instructions.

 

Yep, need to switch to AHCI. That should do the trick.

 

Brabostaan, i did mine in Raid and i was fine. i didn't need to switch to AHCI and i don't think there is any performance difference going either way

Do you know if its better one way or the other?

 

Yup!, it's the RAID setting in your BIOS, just use your install DVD with AHCI or make a new DVD image with the F6 drivers of Intel link

 

LoL, so not sure I understood you xD
Thanks ALL OF YOU guys for overnight answers! But I'm afraid I am getting conflicting results from all of you lol xD...
I seem to understand from my own side of the research now that AHCI will prevent me from going back to a regulard HDD with a windows on it? If true then I dare say its quite a deal breaker to me (Although it does say all around the internet that it is slightly faster I need to have that option available to revert to the original C drive my m17x came with for warranty purpuses.)
Can anyone concur with what I just said (aka is there some truth in it? Or did I read incompetant people?)
Will it work fine RAID settings (though decreased performance?)?

Also how come I get this intel rapid storage page set up once I put the Kingston 128gb on start up (LITTERALLY the first thing I could see when powering the laptop)? Is this where the setting needs to be adjusted, or do I discard that page and wait for the BIOS? to put in RAID? (Which I thought was already in RAID... in fact let me check right now)
Thanks again for the help, just please keep an eye on this thread you guys/gals are great

 

You are in RAID mode. Switch to AHCI and do the install again. Lot of people had problems while on RAID.

You see the RAID screen because you have a SSD and a HDD installed. If you change it in the BIOS you will not see that screen again.

SSD slot 1, HDD slot 0, AHCI mode and boot of the Windows 7 disk to do the install again.

Mine did not finish the install while on RAID.

 

AHCI will not prevent you from going back to anything. If you want to boot off your SSD or HDD, you can just simply change the boot priority in the BIOS.

If you go from emulated IDE to AHCI you will get bluescreens (without a windows reinstall / registry hack), generally you shouldn't have any problems going from RAID to AHCI, but people have been having problems with these M17x R3s so you may need to reinstall Windows.

So, change to AHCI and you will be fine, if not reinstall Windows.

For your information, you should only use RAID with two identical HDD/SSDs. Intel recommends RAID with one HDD (which is weird), but if you have an SSD and a HDD you definitely should NOT be in RAID mode.

 

What you are saying here is that I should put the SSD in the empty hard drive component? (which is called slot 1 when machine is ripped open) and the D drive (500gb 7200) where the original C drive was placed is that correct? (which is called slot 0 when machine is ripped open)
You're telling me to intentionally REVERSE the hard drives placing order is that correct? i am understanding you right?
Also what you are saying is that I must put ACHI to install SSD on that slot 1, guessing I wouldn't have to do anything on slot 0 when putting the 500gb hd? Or is there a weird setting as well? because the hard drives are mixed up. You didn't specify what is to be changed in the bios.

No no no the original C drive from the laptop goes in a box far away from the PC, the D drive (500GB different hd) will NOT have an OS on it it is STRICTLY data storage. My concern is if I need tech support or if I mess the install yet again, I want to be able to physically change the hard drives again to replace SSD and put original Dell HDD WITHOUT having to reinstall its windows. This is very important.
Are you sure I could come back to that Dell HDD without any problems at all? just plug it in start and everything works without a single reinstall? Sorry for being paranoiac right now, I ve read some disturbing stuff online I need to know it works xD

How do I know if I am on emulated IDE or RAID? On bios I did a quick check when booting up. It said under RAID: HD 320GB SATA 3gb/s blablablaaaa.
Is it RAID then? is it SATA? Do I need to press enter on RAID to see further info? (Which I did not)
Sorry I am a noob when it comes to this. But I can learn
EDIT: Just checked again, pressed enter on SATA OPERATION: [RAID], it shows 3 options RAID, AHCI and ATA. RAID is what is set up now.
If I put SSD and the 500GB, and decide to go with ACHI it's gonna be that setting for both or just the SSD?

PS: My SSD is blank right now I formatted it because of the damage on the OS caused by the BSOD during windows update restart.... So Reinstall IS gonna happen

Thanks again you guys

 

Yup...slot 1 is the empty one. Slot 0 has problems, its not always SATA3.

Place the HDD in slot 0 SSD in slot 1. Boot up and go to BIOS, search for the HDD settings and switch the mode from RAID to AHCI, go to boot order and change it to secondary first, save and exit. Boot of Windows 7 disk and install windows on the SSD.

 

Is there any benefits from turning off pagefiling on the SSD and enabling page file on the regular HDD in terms of speed?

 

Seems weird, on youtube when you search videos they put it on the same slot as the C drive HDD... But okay, anybody else cosigns what Brabostaan says?

And Brabostaan, with that set up in mind. Let's say I need customer service with Dell, You know they will tell me my SSD and new HDD is the trouble and will likely ask me to put the original HDD it came with.
If I do put it back I will NOT need to reinstall windows right? (I heard I would, should I switch to AHCI, switching from HDD to SSD requires windows reinstall if they are booting drives) And when I put this C drive back, do I put it where it originally was (slot zero), change BIOS again (daaa) to RAID and booting device to primary ?
Again thanks for the help! Keep it coming

EDIT: This forum is nice Over at Dell I get no info what so ever and I posted there before I did here xD Thanks all

 

i don't know about speed...but this will write and wipe less from the SSD which will extend its life

 

@Stampy. If your original HDD was set up in Raid from the factory (and it was), but you replace the drive, switch to AHCI in BIOS, and install windows, but then later need to switch the original HDD back into your R3, you just switch SATA back to Raid before booting from the original HDD. The original HDD will not boot while SATA is in AHCI mode. Have done this on several occasions. It's not a big deal.

Your c: drive is simply the drive you boot from. It doesn't matter what slot it's in. Boot from a USB memory stick and that becomes the c: drive.

What Brabostaan says is correct.

 

All right THAT IS IT !!!! I'm going for it xD !!!! F it xD !!!! hum...
BTW on my toshiba qosmio, installing windows 7 was a walk in the parc and would install most drivers right off the bat (including wifi)... It was a different windows 7 (original qosmio windows was vista) yet everything would be uneventful, maybe my windows did not install completely precisely because I was not in AHCI?
Thanks everybody anyways, I am going to it now , I ll report back after

 

failed once more. This time i changed the bios to AHCI restarted saving changes. i installed win 7, but AGAIN, it doesnt install the wifi cause no drivers... so once it powers up, i have dell's HDD plugged externally and through device manager i update drivers by making it look for it on the external HDD. it all works except for one, it tells me this:
unknown device, then after the failed attempt it says: embedded system control. and also not supported on this platform.... i tried installing command center next but unable due to the fact that i need frameworks 4...
i then proceed to windows update..... 92 important updates... 2 optional. i go for the important ones. after a while i shut down the pc. which it does. then power it up and BSOD right after alienface 2 in arow.... no 3 rd trial.

SO just like the first time it crashes when i update from windows. anyone can help?

EDIT: also i see something odd... on first restart while installing win 7, there is a screen which last 2sec when it powers back up asking me to choose the OS.... and there is 2 win7 one of them highlighted... only on 1st install, and i only have the SSD in....

 

Did you format the drive?

Are you using the Windows 7 disk that came with the system? You also have a driver disk. After Windows 7 install the drivers except CC. Run Windows update over and over again to the point that there are no more update's. then install CC. Move pagefile to drive D and disable hibernation and the basics is done.

Wifi will not install because its missing the autoinstaller.

 

drive was formatted yes. i used my windows 7 pro DVD which i bought from best buy. the windows withe my laptop being inferior. the ressource CD doesnt have all the needed drivers and I tried installing a couple of them it would give me error msgs...
finally but certainly not least, windows update send my laptop into the BSOD after first wave of updates preventing me from turning the laptop on.
i m going on round 3 right now switched the SSD from slot 0 to 1 with very little hope of success....

 

Format drive and delete al partitions on the SSD while prompted. Use the Windows 7 that came withe the system. See if that works. Mode in AHCI, SSD in port 1.

 

dont have -Intel Chipset HM67 (R289402) on the CD
never mind but the name is intel hm67 xD

 

Right, well...how about the rest? If thats the only one you can install that from the Dell site once you installed the modem/wifi. Or put the file on a USB stick and install it from there.

 

slight update i installed drivers up until the wifi. my intel centrino n1000 is NOT in there. the CD puts a check in front of one of them but install fails after extract... can i break the rules and instal it from external drives through device manager?
by the way, i accidentally reversed the first 2 items on list... is it bad? should i format and start over?

 

Just install the wifi driver from Device manager.
ive read that it doesnt matter what order you install the drivers in so just keep going.

 

then my friend i fear i have a problem xD . i ll use device manager this once then replace it with dell's. i ll keep you guys posted :s.... but i am really scared i might never get it to work

 

Relax, my friend. Worst thing that can happen is you'll have to start over.

Centrino Wireless N1000 Driver: Drivers and Downloads

 

thanks but i HAD to use device manager. i m surfing on my ps3 and pc would not have internet. i went and dl it after installing it with device manager but the application would display the page in code... so didnt work... BUUUUUUUUUUT I did it ! first wave of updates cleared thx i ll post again in a while. this is looking good now

 

I did it. thank you guys without you i would have been lost!

 

Congratulations, Stampy. First times are sometimes a struggle. Enjoy.

 

The only instance you will ever get having a problem reverting back to an old HD from an SSD is where you originally installed your OS to one device when it was set in RAID/IDE and the other when in AHCI.

You SSD should be set at ACHI before OS install. The only time you may need to chance this setting in the bios is for IDE for some SSD firmware upgrades. OR back to RAID if you decide to boot your old OS from your old hard drive as the OS was installed on it whilst the bios was set at RAID.

So if you wipe your old OS hard drive, you should never need to set it to RAID unless you buy an identical SSD and decide to create a RAID array

AHCI, OS install = Happy Win 7
IDE = Firmware Upgrades for SSD ( check SSD manufacturer recommendations )
RAID= 2 identical drives in RAID array OR to boot original OS that was installed with this setting to avoid BSOD or reinstall.

 

Thanks Croatoan, I learned a lot last night . And revelator, it wasn't my first time installing a OS... I really did not understand how come it was so hard cause I come from toshiba... and though I moved away from them cause I was highly dissatisfied with their product quality... I gotta say they made it VERY easy to install the OS + drivers xD. But talking to you guys on this forum made me realize I NEVER EVER EVER did the tweaks to optimize the speed xD...

So First time with Alienware, and first time optimizing (Though the optimization part was rather easy once win7 was up and running ) Thanks again every body .
PS: it's the first time I get a computer that boots under 20 sec xD

 

you may want to disable/uninstall free fall drivers, apparently i read on NBR that if you have an SSD you shouldn't be installing it

 

I chose to install the freefall sensor and not disable it since all my data (music, pictures, videos, documents, etc.) are on a 750GB mechanical drive so if I did drop the machine, I'd like it if that drive parked itself safely.

 

I did the same thing for exactly the same reason. I am not aware of any downside to this approach.

 

LoL, same thing I kept it... though I don't plan on dropping that laptop nor transporting it when still turned on You just never know. Also I have my hard drives backed up on a 2tb my book USB 3.0

I must say I HAD a feeling usb 3.0 WAS NOT as good as they announced it (I think they announced speeds of 1GB/s lol on certain websites)... Or maybe I have a problem on laptop? Cause when I do a transfer of a 1gb video (taken with my canon ) from external to SSD to check out the speed.... I get a 1 sec peak speed at 100mb/s and then average speeds of 50mb/s :S ......... :I which is EXACTLY the same I get with my external hard drive docking bay using the sata cable in the usb 2 sata port (That thing is NICE!!! I was backing up my SSD drive onto external 2TB usb3... I would get transfer speeds of 50Mb/s on average!! which must have been 50times faster than on previous usb 2 transfers)

 

I edited the original post in order to get the solutions with easy access and minimal research for other people who'll have these issues

 

usb3 runs at ~5Gbit/sec which after 8b10b conversion and whatnot puts it around 400MB/sec theoretical. You're not going to see that though since you're still limited by the speed of the mechanical hard drive on either or both sides of the interface. That's why you're getting the same transfer rate as with esata port. It's just the drive speed limiting it now, as opposed to with usb2 where the interface itself could only do 480Mb/sec which in practice was under 40MB/sec.

Note b=bit while B=byte and often serial devices have to send 10bits to represent a byte because otherwise they have a real hard time senging things like the value 0... you can't send 1,000 0s in a row and have both sides agree on how many that was, so 0000 0000 gets converted to something like 100111 0100 so that you never build up a voltage bias from sending too many 1s or 0s.

Anyway, if you get the same speed on esata as you do on usb3, everything is working as expected.

 

Nice to read you got it fixed.

 

Soooooooo, here comes the obvious question after that ... WHAT DA HELL IS IT GOOD FOR xD ?! And how come I only get 50MB/s on average when you tell me to expect 400?! (Remember, from usb 3.0 to SSD....) I mean it definately feels a heck of a lot nicer to have that than my old USB 2 but still I expected considerably more :S

 

run a crystaldiskmark bench and post your numbers here

CrystalDiskMark - Software - Crystal Dew World

 

like i said, you're still limited by the disk inside your ssd enclosure. results will vary depending on how fast that disk was originally and how full it is. You should be getting the same speeds over usb3 as you would on esata as you would if it were an internal drive.

as for what "it's good for" it's good in that it's a relatively cheap standardized interface that can do anything from power a silly usb fan to allow you to transfer data at very high speeds to a hard drive to plugging in a bluray burner.

The standard is approximately 10x faster than usb2, however, until the external disk is 10x faster than usb 2, you wont see that speed. if you replaced the physical drive in your usb3 enclosure with an ssd, you'd see those 300+ MB/sec transfers

 

K gotcha xD...
By the way, the last format on my SSD was made by windows 7 (Though it didn't last at all.) during installation (I specifically clicked on format). I don't know what allocation size it picked, is there a way I can check that out now?
as for crystaldiskmark:

READ/Write
Seq: 198.0/ 155.8
512K:138.6/88.67
4k:8.242/ 8.685
4k QD32: 10.45/10.83

NO IDEA what that thing means xD

 

Stampy...what is the model of your Kingston SSD? Those numbers look very low for a modern SSD.

For comparison purposes here are my numbers:

 

It's not modern. I bought it in microcenter like 8months ago or so don't remember...
===> kingston SNV425-S2/128 GB SSDNow V-Series
But are those numbers at least "good" for an SSD of that time?

 

DAMN!!!!!!!!! pfiou.... like I said maybe my windows formated I fear with the wrong allocation unit size, how do I check which one it picked?
Or what else could it be :S
Your numbers (though egyptian hieroglyphs from where I'm sitting) compared to mine are strikingly low and scary xD

 

i looked at some reviews for your drive and your crystaldiskmark numbers don't look all that low for your drive

Kingston SSDNow V Series 128GB SSD Review - CrystalDiskMark v2.2 - Legit Reviews

 

Naaaa not the same one, you looked at snv425-s2bd, mine is s2 BLANK.
On kingston they seperate it.

 

yea, I also have a 128GB M4 and I got
Seq 479.6 196.9
512k 362.7 179.3
4k 23.33 44.68
QD32 312.3 179.2

so they're within a few % of Slick's numbers. Are you running FW 0009, Slick?

Edit:

For comparison, my data drive (the 750GB Caviar Black that come with the lappy)

Seq 126.2 124.5
512k 47.59 69.76
4k 0.668 1.295
QD32 1.590 1.359

So there's the indictment of how bloody slow mechanical drives are.

 

ya, i'm running 0009. I hope they come out with a 0010 and make things even faster

 

ok...looked at this review of the S2...you are in the ballpark

Kingston 128GB SSDNow V Series SNV425-S2 Gen 2 SSD Review - HD Tach v3.0.4.0 & CrystalDiskMark v3.0 - Legit Reviews