Urgent Help Lenovo T420 mSATA!

Okay so I installed my mSATA a month ago not really knowing what I was doing but everything seemed to be working fine. However now I'm not sure if it is...

Where should i be installing new things to? For example I'm trying to install microsoft office and skype but I'm not sure if it's being installed to my mSATA or harddrive!!

Thanks.

 

Well I have a Crucial M4 64GB SSD as my main HD and using my 500 GB HD in my ODD. I have all my main programs installed on my SSD, such as Skype, Office 2010, Adobe Reader, Firefox, WinRAR, etc and have all my games, other programs that I don't usually use on my hard drive.

My rule for my laptop is if I use it often and I need it up quick, I install it on my SSD. Otherwise it's going on my HD.

 

How can you tell what gets installed to the HDD and what gets installed to the SSD though?

 

If you installed the OS on you SSD, it should be on your C:\ drive. Your main HD should be the D:\ or the E:\ base on how you have it setup. My programs that need to be started up fast would be on the C:\Program Files while everything else would be on the D:\(E:\) drive.

On most program installs, they'll give you the option to where you want the program to be installed. Just be sure to change the drive if you want it on your HD or on your SSD.

 

Okay my OS is on my C:\ drive but it also shows I have 5 more drives. D,E,F,Q and then a SYSTEM_DRV.
My Disk 1 drive is my mSATA I believe and it includes SYSTEM_DRV, C (Windows 7 OS), and Q (Lenovo_Recovery) and my Disk 0 also contains D (SYSTEM_DRV), E (Windows 7 OS) and F (Lenovo_Recovery).

 

Probably the easiest way to identify the mSATA is just to look at drives in My Computer until you find the one whose size is close to your mSATA (probably 40 or 80 GiB?). When installing apps, install to the same drive letter as that drive if you want to install the application to mSATA. However if you moved your user directory to a different drive, you might want to take note of that. Some applications store data and updates to your user directory as opposed to Program Files.

 

But when I'm installing something I never seem to get to pick where I want to install it, how do i do this? And also, should is it normal to have this many drives?

 

If you are using a Windows installer CD/DVD, it should let you create/delete partitions and show you all logical disks before you install. If you want to use Lenovo's recovery CD, then the easiest method is just to ensure only your mSATA drive is connected before you boot the recovery disk.

If you have your mSATA, a spinning disk, and an optical drive installed, that should account for three drives. Another zero to four drives could be a media card reader.

 

What previous posters said. I'm not trying to insult you in the slightest, but it sounds like you're just the victim of a bit of sloppy clean-up work, or lack thereof, after you ported everything over to your mSATA drive.

Be aware that a drive letter that shows up in Windows may refer to just a partition on a physical hard drive. When your laptop came from the factory, it had three partitions on it: the system partition, the OS partition (C , and the recovery partition (Q . These were three partitions on one drive.

Then when you did whatever you did to create the installation on your new mSATA drive, you apparently created all three of these partitions on your new mSATA drive too. Windows is currently recognizing and showing all of these, even though your old mechanical hard drive doesn't need the system or recovery partitions (unless you want to leave them there). You can, for instance, delete the system and restore partitions off your mechanical drive and resize your main partition there to reclaim the space.

I would bet that your old mechanical drive still has the Windows folder and everything else still on it, even though it's not really necessary any more. Here's what I'd do if I were you:

(0. Find and become familiar with the Disk Management tool in Windows 7. It's in Control Panel / Administrative Tools / Computer Management. Also, of course you will want to back up your data before you begin.)

1. Before you forget, make Rescue and Recovery disks to restore your system in the event of failure, in case of failure of the hard drive containing R&R.

2. Delete the system partition off of the mechanical drive.

3. Delete the recovery partition (which generally shows up as Q: for a new install) off of either the old mechanical hard disk (if you prefer it to be on your mSATA drive) or mSATA drive (if the opposite).

4. Resize the main partition on each physical drive as applicable to reclaim the now-empty space from the just-deleted partitions.

5. In Disk Management, remove the drive letter from the system partition and Rescue and Recovery partition. R&R will work without the drive letter, don't worry about that. This will keep you from getting confused in the future, and simply keep them out of your face, for a cleaner Windows Explorer browser etc.

6. Once you've finished installing all the programs you care to recover, take a system image backup of your mSATA's OS partition (the new C . To do this, I simply pressed the blue ThinkVantage button during bootup and took it from there. The tools made it easy to put a full system image backup on my data/mechanical drive. This will be handy if you need to recover your system because you won't have to reinstall all your post-factory-load programs, find the license keys, activate them, etc. I like having this roughly 40GB image on my mechanical disk because if an mSATA failure ever happens, I can recover more easily-- for instance, simply plop in a new mSATA drive and restore the image onto it. If the mechanical disk fails, no biggie besides loss of any non-backed-up data files; I can take a new image from the mSATA.

Needless to say, you muck about in your system at your own risk. Make sure you clearly understand what you're doing before you delete anything.

 

Why did you try to install an mSATA without knowing what you were doing? Did you use any of the guides on here about installing one? I strongly recommend you get someone more experienced to handle this.

 

@Iucounu

Thank you so much, you have not insulted me at all (I'm not the greatest when it comes to computers). When you say make rescue and recovery disks, are you referring to the ones I already made prior to installing my msata (I believe there was 1 dvd and 3 cd's), if so I already have those.

If this is correct, I will proceed to follow your directions as they seem pretty straightforward.

Once again thank you for the help, I greatly appreciate it.

 

Here's another "not trying to be insulting" point: backup your data before trying any of the repartitioning.

I just did a complete reinstall of Windows last week. Before beginning, I made 3 complete backups of my data onto 3 separate external hard drives and a 4th copy of my most important files onto a couple of USB flash drives. Yes, I'm paranoid ;-)

 

Backing up is good (and standard) advice. Remember: measure twice, cut once.

As for the restore process, I would personally say go for a clean install of Windows. You can find links to the full legal image download (from Digital River) by Googling then activate it with the serial key on your license sticker. Read a clean full install guide for more details.

 

Yep, backing up before you begin is definitely sound advice. It's not that I would've forgotten that step, I probably thought it went without mentioning. I shouldn't assume anything, though.

 

Seriously, get someone around you to help you out. You don't want to mess up installing your OS. There will most likely be something that pops up mid install and asking on here would take too long.

 

It's already installed. His main problem appears to be that he's got a bunch of stuff lingering from the old installation of Windows, and that he's confused about where installations of new programs are going. Neither of these requires a fresh installation. In addition I think it's easier to use the built-in Rescue and Recovery tools to install onto an mSATA (I did this myself, have installed Windows from scratch plenty of times myself, and even the OP was apparently able to do it successfully).

 

How would I go about doing step 4?

 

Bump, can someone give me a little more help on steps 4-6.

Thanks.