Problems with adding SSD

I recently bought the 850 evo ssd for my laptop and got everything cloned and installed. When I boot with just that SSD installed everything works fine, unfortunately when I boot with both the new SSD and the original HDD in a different bay, the laptop (a Y410p) attempts to boot from the HDD. Does anyone know what might be going on? Thanks!

 

You usually have to go into the bios setup and select the default boot device. The only issue is with some of these UEFI bios screens it shows Windows Boot Manager for both disks so it's a guess as to which one is correct.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk HD

 

you need to go to the bios and change boot device. After that you can boot from the SSD. However, I don't know if it was the case but when I had OS on both my SSD and HDD, windows would make me choose to whether to boot windows 7 (HDD) or windows 8.1 (SSD). So given the context here you've the same OS on both drives, it might be better to format the old HDD partition with OS after choosing SSD as boot device.

also, on a side note, since you've just got your SSD, it's probably better to do a clean install on it now instead of cloning, given you've not used it much.

 

Been there, with a little difference. A few years back, I was working on a friends HP desktop and upgraded to a SSD. I changed the BIOS to load the SSD 1st.. however, no matter what I did, it would boot the IDE drive after restarting. I finally figured out I didn't set the BIOS for AHCI, and the SSD was in as IDE. I had to fix that before the darn thing would boot right. I'd never seen it before, and know better now.

 

I tried this, the problem is that the BIOS only shows the HDD when both drives are in. It only shows the SSD if that is the only drive in the machine.

 

My BIOS only shows the HDD when both drives are in. It only shows the SSD if that is the only drive in the machine.

 

My BIOS tells me the name of each drive so that is not a problem. However, if both drives are inserted it will only show me the HDD.

 

I'm not sure if this matters, but the SSD is installed in my laptop's main bay, while the HDD is in my y410p's ultrabay slot. Thanks for all the replies!

 

I had, that Windows didn't want to find my 2nd HDD after Install. I had to boot with loading the Legacy ROM (boot was UEFI though) and then I could see it in the Windows Disk-Management, re-scan it, assign a letter to and similar.

Only things I can imagine in your case that could maybe help, would be:

1. Check the disk in diskpart (list disk, select #of disk, list partition, check if the primary partition + the two system partitions are there, check id's of devices, etc., check if partition scheme is GPT, etc.)
2. Run Checkdisk or any better tool you might have from a software like Paragon Hard Disk Manager.
3. Hardcore-solution: Delete the OS + System-partitions from the HDD, so that only the data-partition is left. Expand to maximum, force the System to boot from the SSD.

You should also call the support of your notebook's manufacturor, maybe they know something we cannot know.

 

The problem:
An OS Bootloader boots by going to a specific disk_id and partition_id. For example, it will say "Boot Windows from disk_0, parititon_1". When you added a new SSD, the disk_id and parititon_id of your mechanical HDD did not change. And since you did a perfect clone of your drive, the Windows bootloader is still trying to boot from the disk_id and partition_id of your HDD. So you need to tell the Windows bootloader to update, and boot off of the disk_id and partition_id of your SSD, instead of the HDD.

The solution:
Run Windows setup (off of a Windows DVD or USB flash drive), and tell it to do a Repair installation. Windows will detect the location of your OS install, and update the bootloader info accordingly.

But this is where it gets tricky, because I don't know how your computer assigns disk_id's. I would first try removing your HDD, and leave only your SSD in your system. And then run Windows setup --> Repair Installation. If your laptop assigns unique disk_ids based on unique drive ids, then this should work.

However, there is the chance that your laptop assigns disk_ids based on the "order" in which it sees drives... in which case, the above solution won't work. If it doesn't work, then just swap the drives so that they're connected to different SATA ports, and that should work.


Additional Note:
When you clone HDD --> SSD, there are two things to consider:

1) SSDs store data differently than HDDs. You need to make sure that your cloning is 4K aligned, so that the data on the SSD is written in 4K chunks aligned with the NAND memory cells. If it isn't 4K aligned, then you'll notice pretty significantly degraded read and write performance (since your SSD will need to read/write across two NAND memory cells, for every 4K of data it reads/writes). There are some tools out there (you can Google it) to determine if your drive is 4K aligned.

If your drive ISN'T 4K aligned, then you'll either need to clone your drive using a tool that recognizes 4K alignment; or pre-create partitions (that will be 4K aligned), and do a partition-to-partition copy; or do a clean re-install of Windows on a blank SSD, which will 4K-align the drive when the partitions are created.

2) Be sure to turn off Disk Defragmentation for your SSD, and enable TRIM for your SSD. You can run a Google search to find out how to manually disable Disk Defragmentation and TRIM.

 

1: DiskPart can't find the HDD with either the list disk or list volume command.
2: Checkdisk shows only the 256 GB SSD.
3: I would, but have no way to, as I cannot access the HDD.

Thanks!

 

First, thanks for this amazing explanation and solution. Since I don't currently have installation media (I'm using the Windows that came on this laptop with a free Windows 10 upgrade) I'll have to work on that over the weekend.
As for the 4K alignment, I used the standard Samsung Data Migration software (made by Clonix) that came with the SSD. I checked with the AS SSD benchmark and it appears to have not been aligned (screenshot attached). Also TRIM has been enabled and scheduled defragmentation disabled.

 

Just remove the HDD, leave the only the SSD in. And then run Windows Setup --> Repair Installation (with only SSD installed). Windows should boot fine, after bootloader info is repaired.

Then wipe the HDD, and reinsert that into your system.

As for skavis suggestion of deleting partitions.... Dont do it! You'd be deleting bootloader info and your OS install. That's all fine and good, but I'd recommend that you wait until you have a working system that boots off of the SSD, before you go and destroy data off of the one drive you currently have (HDD) that does boot. If skavis suggestion doesn't work, you'll be left with two drives that don't boot.


Sent from my XT1575 using Tapatalk

 

If you need Windows 10 media, do a Google search for "Download Windows 10 ISO". There will be a link from Microsoft that lets you download the install, and come with a tool to create a bootable USB flash drive.

As for 4k alignment... It's up to you what you want to do. If you want 4k alignment fixed, you'll need to re-partition your drive from scratch. If not, then your drive will work... Just a bit slower.

Sent from my XT1575 using Tapatalk

 

Interesting I never benchmark anything so I have no experience other than the "It's way faster than my HDD was", however, look at yours it is much faster than either of my laptops with Samsung SSDs. Not sure I want to spend a bunch of time troubleshooting this but the offset comes up good on both but the read / write times and total score are significantly slower than yours. In the 400s for sequential

I'm somewhat curious as to what is causing this. One is a EVO 840 mSata in the MSI and the other is M.2 EVO 850 in AW 15 R2; both with similar performance.

 

I wouldn't worry about it too much. There's something wrong with skavi's scores.

SATA based drives, whether it be 2.5" SATA-3 or M.2 SATA, should top out at around 500-550MBps sequential reads, and around 250MBps - 500MBps sequential writes (depending on the particular drive model). All other measurements should be lower than those sequential read/write speeds.

Skavi's scores are far too high. I'm guessing that there's some kind of RAM caching that is enabled, and those scores are coming from cache hits (and therefore pulling from system RAM). Those numbers (2507, 3410, 9059 MBps) are the transfer speeds you'll see in system RAM, not SSDs.

 

Cloning from HDD to SSD is very, very bad. Clean install is the way!

 

Agreed, always clean install!!!

 

Skavi has RAPID mode enabled, which is Samsung's pseudo RAM drive implementation. It benchmarks at the speed of your RAM, but hasn't been shown to make a significant positive difference in real life. On the contrary, it has been tested to slow down some real-life processes.

 

While also acclerating others, espeically if you have enough ram to load the entire system partition. Adding another layer is totally expected to slow down something a bit, real life or not.


I see no reason to use Samsung's implementation instead of some general purpose caching tools though.