inspiron n4010 primary hdd

really? i was reading the manual and the steps you have to take just to get to the primary hdd...

 

This is typical for a lot of Dell's current consumer models...

 

Yep

They dont want you working on it yourself

 

I absolutely don"t get it, Being able to swap out a hdd easily is paramount.I never heard of hdd failures years ago, but today there common. Maybe because the capacities are larger. I had a hdd failure on my m1330 and just recently on my new 14r. The Seagate 500gig 5400 which came on my 14r and was replaced with the same Seagate has a very bad rep for failure.

 

Almost all the new Inspirons place the drive underneath the palmrest. In reality it is like 2-3 minutes of work vs 5 seconds. It's really not that bad.

 

Yeah, the evolution of placement is reaching degenerative heights.
In a desktop, no problem.
In a laptop/notebook, It is (should be) essential that HDD, RAM and extra connectors like pci-e would be just as easily accessible as the battery.

What would be next? Going back to the way of Compcraq soldering RAMsticks to the mainboard?

I'd prefer 2 screws and 5 seconds, than ripping off plastic, removing 3-6 screws, crowbarring with a screwdriver up the harddrive, replace it, return the keyboard, just to realize that you forgot to actually hook up the harddrive. (It is possible. I have seen people wedge a square stick into a round hole).

 

i went through it and got the ssd install. now it just wont wanna boot from it lol it'll still boot from the stock hdd though. i guess it is picky. cloning it doesnt work either.

 

Maybe the drive is defective? Did you reinstall Windows on it properly?

 

i didnt reinstal i cloned it from the stock drive. i also tried installing a fresh copy of windows 7 but there were not drivers during installation, the os can't see the drivers apparently sata drivers are needed.

 

Windows 7 shouldn't need F6 SATA drivers, only XP if your SATA operation is set to RAID/AHCI.

Sounds like your new drive is defective if your computer boots fine from the old drive..

 

my xp with sata drivers CAN see this drive if i attempt to install xp but not with windows 7...

 

i found out what the problem was... need to clone all three partition. i think dell bios is searching for something on the stock drive which wasn't on the cloned ssd.

 

If trying to install a 3-partitioned clone, then yes, the original cloneMBR would still expect to find three partitions. -Sulphur and acid will rain over the brave user that tries to alter anything. ref: MBR

There might be systems that ignores these trivial details, but windows is not one of them.

I am actually quite surprised that you've got a clone from HDD to function on a SSD.

What I'd do in your case was not to clone, but do a fresh install on the SSD, then copy over data to the new setup. I would be able to postpone the graying of my hair that way.

 

There are quite a few computers out there where the BIOS is set to AHCI by default. This will make installing OS an issue. If altering AHCI to SATA, you will have no problems installing Win7, equal to WinXP.
The computers are often 'so fancy' that to take full advantage of it, you'll need to install some chipset 'to be installed by F6'-drivers from Intel.

Yeah it is a hassle. Please direct the complaints to Micro$soft.

 

I just got one of these last week because there was a price error a few weeks ago. Replacing the hard drive was a bit of a pain, but its not rocket science, follow the manual and just unscrew about 25 screws and pull some junk out as opposed to a couple screws. It took about an hour, instead of a few minutes. I plopped in a seagate 7200rpm drive (because of the low power consumption compared to a WD black). Installed with a dell oem win 7 disc and it worked without any problems. Had to install a couple drivers, works great without all the pre-loaded crapware on it.
Its not the hard drive will ever get replaced again unless it fails, so its not such a big deal pulling the laptop apart to replace it.