HP Envy 17 (32XXXX) How do you bypass mSATA drive?

I abandoned booting the OS from the mSATA that came with my new Envy 17 3rd gen and was planning to use it for game/app storage but as long as the mSATA drive is in there the PC insists on booting it. There is NO BIOS option for choosing which notebook drive I want to use. It just tries the mSATA and with that now formatted NTFS it just says Missing Operating System and doesn't try the other internal SATA drives... I tried to use a bootloader on the mSATA to get it to boot the internal SSD but I think the bootloader had problems.

Anyone have any ideas?

 

curious, why would you abandon booting from the mSATA drive? That's bound to be faster than whatever else you have in there... unless you have a Solid State in your SATA 3 bay, I don't see why wouldn't do that...

 

What I would try...

Physically remove mSATA (remove 6 screw access panel)
reinstall w/ recovery disks
make sure the system boots
shutdown & reinstall mSATA
boot...

My reasoning is because while attempting to install my SSD, I discovered that I could move the original Win7 hybrid to the second bay and it still automatically booted just fine... This did confuse some third party software that expected the boot device to exist as disk0, but basically everything else just worked. When I loaded the SSD (disk0) with the recovery DVDs, the system booted from the SSD instead.

( THIS WEBSITE IS REALLY F'ed UP for IE9 at least... )

 

You answered your own question. When I bought it configured with the mSATA I thought the mSATA was equivalent in speed to an internal SSD. In the weeks of waiting for it to ship I discovered that was not the case, it's about half the speed! So now I am booting from an SSD and want to use the mSATA SSD for less speed critical apps/storage.

 

Like it won't load/freezes/etc.? I'm glad you said something, I thought there was something wrong with my IE. I have to use Chrome instead to view it.

Thanks for the suggestion. I'm not quite sure if I can try it, though. I'm not using the image shipped with the computer but an image from my just-deprecated first generation Envy (with all drivers updated/etc.). The system works perfectly. I'm not sure if what you're saying would therefore have any applicability in my situation in that I must keep my image and not use another.

I am wondering, though, how what you described worked. I mean, I don't think you had an mSATA drive did you? thought BIOS would try each channel to see if the drive is bootable, so I would have thought it would find your bootable disk 1 just fine and not care that it wasn't disk 0. I could be wrong, that used to be the case with IDE and BIOSs. But if you do have a setup with an mSATA drive as well, then it's definitely a more applicable example and I would then wonder how it might do it.

My guess is that I need some bootloader on the mSATA which just handles the computer's insistence on booting the mSATA and boots the SATA SSD instead. I did try that, but the software was a few years old and it gave me some problems which could have been the software rather than the situation.

Anyway... I appreciate the suggestion. I'll mull it over. I just don't have any spare drives to try it with, and I've got to use my own image, so I'm reluctant to try unless it's going to magically let me use my own image.

 

I am posting this from an XPro/IE8 machine... much better
Found a solution for my Win7/IE9 - F12 (developer tools checked)->Browser Mode: IE8

... and you are correct (maybe on all your points), but I don't have a mSATA. My thought process had more to do with making sure the Intel Rapid Storage configuration didn't have anything to do with things... Now that I can reliably navigate around the forums, I will do a little more checking... I remember reading similiar complaints (re: YOUR situation) on the dvt7-7000 thread... unless you get there first...
luck
j

Last night I installed EasyBCD bootloader on to my SSD(disk0) so I can boot from either it or my Hybrid(disk1). My issue originally stems from the hybrid only operating @ 3GB/sec. I installed my 6GB/sec SSD in the 2nd drive bay, and it too only operated @ 3GB/sec. Comes to find out that the hybrid has HP firmware which cripples it either intentionally or by accident, AND (the second) drive bay #1 ONLY supports 3GB/sec.
I was thinking that the other 6GB/sec port was somehow used for the mSATA... BUT that has NOT been definitively confirmed.


Update: might wanna read this -
http://forum.notebookreview.com/hp-...ekbook-6t-1000-cant-reformat.html#post8573660

 

Thanks for that tip! Now I know what to do when that happens.

Interesting. I did see someone somewhere mention Intel Rapid Storage related to not being able to see or access a drive... and how once he changed something in that it that software he could. I did go looking in that software but since I cannot (any more) run the software with the mSATA drive installed (since it won't boot and has no OS) perhaps I couldn't see whatever option I needed to see to tell it not to try to boot with that drive. My point was just that perhaps you're right and the "magical" element which is storing the info about which drive to boot from isn't in BIOS (or is hidden in BIOS) and is controlled by Intel Rapid Storage...

Yikes! Hope you get that sorted out, that's very strange and troubling. I should speed test my disks as well.

 

Interesting, and it may be related to what I'm experiencing, albeit with the RAID. The weird thing is, which you may have noticed, the BIOS in the new Envy is absurdly simplistic, barely anything in there to configure. Someone said somewhere that it was 'locked down", and I suppose they might have meant just this, that HP has prevented us from seeing/making many possible changes (such as the graphics switching, such as the mSATA use, etc.). Thanks again!

 

I am not sure if the msata port is sata iii, but if it is, you may want to considered forking out some cash and buying a MyDigitalSSD 128GB Smart Series SATA III msata drive. It is less than $179 and will give you some great read speeds. They also have a 256gb that is even faster. It will obviously add more cost to your system, but in the end you will have more ssd storage and can run you OS (and other programs) from you msata with real ssd speeds.

 

Thanks a lot for the info! I'll definitely keep that in mind for my next upgrade. At the moment I think I'll have enough space and with the recent purchase of the laptop I'll need a bit of time for my bank account to recover. But it's nice to know I'll be able to add more and faster storage.

 

another reference:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/hp-...abled-mssd-new-dv7-quad-core.html#post8572500

 

Very interesting read, but sadly I don't think it applies to the new Envy since the Envy BIOS has none of the Intel RAID options mentioned on that page. I read somewhere in that thread or elsewhere that the third generation had a "cheaper" motherboard that didn't include the hardware RAID options of previous Envy motherboards.

My best bet at this point looks to be the boot loader. I haven't had much luck with EasyBCD as yet, but will try it once my mSATA to SATA adapter arrives and lets me run the OS with the mSATA connected (via USB).

 

since I don't have one, I can only provide links to potential nuggets of wisdom, i.e., http://forum.notebookreview.com/hp-...ivy-bridge-owners-lounge-352.html#post8670767

This implies that even on the dv[67]-7000, there is no bios settings, but setup using Intel Rapid Storage (somehow?!). I hate to say anything without trying things myself... there is a lot of 'conflicting' advice on these forums... so if this helps you, good... if not, well... When you convince your self you have a handle on things, please share back with me. - thanks j

 

The impression I get is that *if* I had booted up with the original OS on the mSATA disk then I could have seen the Intel Rapid Storage options I probably need to change, but since I didn't it won't show them to me. I could be wrong, but that's the best theory I've got right now.

It keeps getting more complicated... I realize now how little I know about how a computer boots up. I used to think I knew a lot! I tried to install grub and grub4dos today but quickly discovered that my setup using TrueCrypt for the system drive makes that complicated... I thought I could just throw a boot loader on the mSATA and have that bootloader say go boot from the other drive instead... but I guess it doesn't work quite that way...

I think I'm going to take a break for a few days and just enjoy my new laptop before getting irritated again. Thanks again for finding more info!

 

Do you have a MSATA now as a boot? Was it aftermarket? Is it truly running at 6gb? Sorry if you already answered these questions.

Thanks