The Notebook Review forums were hosted by TechTarget, who shut down them down on January 31, 2022. This static read-only archive was pulled by NBR forum users between January 20 and January 31, 2022, in an effort to make sure that the valuable technical information that had been posted on the forums is preserved. For current discussions, many NBR forum users moved over to NotebookTalk.net after the shutdown.
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.

    Y470 can't load windows 7 to 64GB Kingston mSATA SSD

    Discussion in 'Lenovo' started by hoopics, Jan 1, 2012.

  1. hoopics

    hoopics Notebook Enthusiast

    Reputations:
    0
    Messages:
    12
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    5
    Ready to lose my mind here, please help:

    I have a Y470 running Windows 7.

    I bought a Kingston SSDNow mS100 SMS100S2/64G mSATA 64GB SATA II SSD, with plans of making it my system drive. I can't get it to work.

    1. BIOS recognizes the Kingston drive as Drive 0.
    2. Windows 7 Device manager recognizes the drive as Drive 0, and says it is working properly, but under volumes says:

    Type: Unknown
    Status: Not Initialized
    Partition Style: Not Applicable
    Capacity: 61057 MB
    Unallocated space: 0 MB
    Reserved space: 0 MB

    and it lists no volumes.
    3. Windows explorer won't map the drive, so I can't select it to format it.
    4. I created restore disks and removed my internal HDD, to load Windows 7 to it. The restore program recognizes the drive, but doesn't bring up any volumes to select and if I just select the drive it says the capacity is insufficient to load Windows which is plainly not so.

    I figure I need to somehow initialize or format the drive, but I have no idea how to do that. Help!
     
    hoopics, Jan 1, 2012
    #1
  2. wildcard36qs

    wildcard36qs Notebook Consultant

    Reputations:
    3
    Messages:
    124
    Likes Received:
    1
    Trophy Points:
    30
    In the Windows 7 search bar type "partition" and select that and it will go to disk management. Right click on the disk and you should be able to create a volume.
     
    wildcard36qs, Jan 1, 2012
    #2
  3. hoopics

    hoopics Notebook Enthusiast

    Reputations:
    0
    Messages:
    12
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    5
    Thanks! This let me create the volume as an NTFS F:\. One touch recovery still wouldn't let me recover the system to that drive -- said the space on the volume was insufficient.

    About ready to throw the SSD in the trash, I did some digging and came across Acronis Migrate Easy as an option for moving one bootable HDD to another. I downloaded that free (15 day free trial), and told it to migrate the contents of my internal HDD to the SSD and make the SSD the new bootable drive. It worked like a charm (after going into BIOS to make the SSD the primary drive), and didn't require burning new recovery discs or removing the HDD. Bonus points -- it repartitioned the old internal HDD into one big (and wide open) F:\ for data as part of the process.
     
    hoopics, Jan 2, 2012
    #3
  4. wildcard36qs

    wildcard36qs Notebook Consultant

    Reputations:
    3
    Messages:
    124
    Likes Received:
    1
    Trophy Points:
    30
    Awesome, glad to hear. I will eventually grab an SSD for this thing.
     
    wildcard36qs, Jan 2, 2012
    #4
  5. macrat

    macrat Newbie

    Reputations:
    0
    Messages:
    2
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    5
    Hi Hoopics, I tried the same thing but Acronis scaled down the volume sizes proportionally. Did it do that with yours & has there been any space problems subsequently?
     
    macrat, Feb 17, 2012
    #5