W520 Boot Time Discrepencies

Hey All!

I picked up a W520 this past spring (config in my sig) and overall, i am super - and I mean SUPER - stoked on this purchase. Best computer money that I've spent in a long while (I'll throw my Dell U2711 monitor in there as well!).

Anyway, I took delivery of the W520 with the 7200 RPM 500GB drive in it. Additionally, I purchased two SSDs: an 80GB Intel 310 and a 160GB Intel 320 drive.

Based on recommendations here, I popped out the HDD and installed both SSDs. Before doing that, I made back up discs and then did a completely fresh install on the SSDs, which worked out perfectly.

Originally I kept the DVD drive in the computer, but I really never used it. So, I picked up an ultra-bay and threw the original 500GB drive back in to the computer as well. Who wouldn't be stoked on almost 750 GB of storage in their laptop!

However, once I had the HDD back in the system, when I rebooted my machine, the boot sequence took substantially longer. Not hugely longer, but went from just under 30 seconds to over a minute. If I boot the W520 WITHOUT the HDD in it, boot time is back to it's original 28-29 second time. Put the HDD back in and it's back up to 1+ minutes.

Sooo - here's what I'm thinking... The HDD was never re-formatted and still has all of it's boot and recovery partitions on it, as well as the main drive on it. I'm wondering if the boot and / or recovery partition are confusing the OS on boot up, or if for some reason the bios is checking them as well. Should I just format the HDD clean and if so, does anyone think that will speed up booting? Or is the fact that the HDD's in the system, always going to make it boot slower, regardless of the fact that one of the SSDs is the boot drive?

Any advice would be appreciated! I'll probably just format the HDD anyway and see what happens, but I though that I would ask before I pull the trigger.

Thanks in advance!

 

I doubt the computer is "confused." You can go to the BIOS settings and change the boot order to move your SSD to the top of the list, so it will always be the device where your computer looks for boot information, and see if that resolves the problem.

 

Which Ultrabay hard drive adapter did you buy?

You should certainly format the drive.

You should also look at the BCD entries. BCD = Boot Configuration Database.

From an elevated cmd console, enter bcdedit. It will dump the BCD to the screen. If you see more than one drive, that would be a problem with your config.

 

Well, I took the easy route:

Booted up without the Ultrabay HDD in the computer and then hot plugged it in. Not sure if that's OK or not, but it worked fine. Next, I deleted the OS partition (just over 1 GB) and the main partition on the HDD (465BG), and then combined them into one new partition. The Win 7 disc manager is SO easy for this - ridiculous! I left the recovery partition there (<10GB).

So, reformatted (NTFS) the new partition 466GB partition with no data in it, shut down, and then rebooted with the Ultrabay HDD in the system.

Good news - back to 30 second boot times.

Interestingly, I'm not sure why it the HDD initially made the boot times longer: i checked the boot sequence in the Bios and it was set as expected (CD, then USB, then SSD and then HDD), but either way, formatting the HDD did the trick.

Cool and thanks for the tips.

Ps: one question: i'm logged in as Admin I think, but when I run bcdedit from CMD, it says: "The Boot configuration data store could not be opened. Access is denied." What's up? Am I not logged in as admin?

 

An account in the administrator group is not necessarily using admin privilege at all times.

To run the cmd console elevated, you must right click the CMD console app and "Run it as administrator" explicitly.

The tell tale sign is that Administrator: Command Console in the title bar of the console.

The BCD store won't let you mess with it unless you are running elevated or as the RID 500 admin.