I finished this upgrade and am reporting back on the results.Thanks to everyone for the suggestions: Pat L in the Acronis forums: http://forum.acronis.com/forum/27658; and chimpanzee, Greg, madmattd, and mikey1388 in the notebookreview.com forums:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/solid-state-drives-ssds-flash-storage/608654-has-anyone-successfully-upgraded-hp-pavillion-dm4-2070us-ssd.html
As a side note, HP Customer support would not provide any assistance in this modification except to try to up-sell a more expensive custom laptop. The most difficult part for me was imaging and restoring of the HDD partitions and getting the new MBR confugured for the SSD. To do this, I used ATI Home 2010 on a separate desktop computer where I could cable the Sata-2 HDD and SSD directly rather than going through a slow USB interface. Because I was operating from a desktop, the imaging and recovery could be performed using Acronis in Windows rather than the Recovery CD. Adapting Pat L's procedure from the Acronis forums, what worked for me is documented as follows:
SSD: Image, Restore, Configure
1) If the HDD the HDD which will be the source is on a system with Acronis 2010 or later:
- Make an Acronis image of the entire HDD and all its partitions.
otherwise:
- With power off, remove the HDD from the laptop and connect it to another PC with Acronis;
- For imaging speed: cable the HDD into the IDE or SATA interface rather than USB interface;
- Make an Acronis image of the entire HDD and all its partitions.
2) From Windows 7 Disk Management, make a print screen of the HDD partition allocation graphic.
3) With power off, cable the SSD into the desktop system, using the IDE or SATA interface if possible.
4) Using Windows Storage Management, allow Windows to format the SSD with a MBR configuration.
5) Using ATI2010 Home (from Windows), recover the HDD image partitions (in order) to the SSD:
- Allow for a 1MB offset for the 1st partition and resize any partitions as necessary to fit the SSD.
- As a final step, restore the MBR and disk signature.
6) With power off, cable the SSD into the laptop and attempt to boot.
My HP DM4-2070 would not boot at this point, responding with the following error message:
Window failed to start. A recent hardware or software change might be the cause.
Error: 0xc0000225 - Boot selection required device is inaccessible.
I'm not sure whether its a Windows or HP BIOS issue, but the following procedure solved the problem:
7) Boot from the CD/DVD to a Repair Console prompt from the Windows recovery disks and verify that the correct SSD partition is active (text inside parens are comments):
DISKPART
List Disk
Select DISK 0 (assuming Disk 0 is your Windows 7 SSD)
LIST PARTITION
SELECT PARTITION 1 (assuming Partition 1 is your active Windows 7 system partition)
ACTIVE
EXIT
8) Finally, initialize the SSD's MBR with the following commands:
bootrec.exe /fixmbr
bootrec.exe /RebuildBcd
At this point, the laptop boots from the SSD. Additional SSD configuration steps which are well-documented elsewhere include: verification of trim; disabling defrag; elimination of hiberfile.sys; and optimizing the size of pagefile.sys.
After all this, I'm not sure this effort was worthwhile. On my HP DM4-2070 the "improvements" are noted as follows:
- power-on boot to Windows 7 password has been reduced from 24 to 17 seconds,
- the time from password entry to stable desktop has been reduced from 17 seconds to 7 seconds,
- free hard disk space has been reduced (ouch!) from 517.19GB under the original 640GB HDD to 55.4GB under the new 120GB OCZ SSD,
- and Windows experience index has increased from 5.9 to 6.3 with HDD rated at 7.7.
Ho Hum...
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
