Installing Linux on iSSD - Samsung Chronos 7

I recently purchased a Samsung Chronos 700Z5A. I upgraded the primary Hard-Drive to a Samsung 830 SSD I had purchased for my last machine and moved the existing 1TB hard-drive to a caddy in the CD/DVD drive bay. I am now left with the following:

Disk 0: 128GB Samsung 830 SSD
Disk 1: 8GB iSSD P4 - ExpressCache Drive
Disk 2: 1TB Backup Drive

Since the 8GB iSSD was no longer being used for ExpressCache (it has slower transfer rates than the 830 and would probably decrease performance), I thought it could be used as a boot volume for Linux. So I installed Linux Mint on the iSSD but now I cannot boot to the drive.

On Disk manager, the drive appears as a Healthy, Active Primary Partition. It is not mapped to a Drive Letter. In the BIOS boot menu, there is no option to boot from the iSSD. There is only the Samsung 830 drive and other options include: USB FDD, USB HDD, Network etc. However, the iSSD does not appear at all.

Is it possible to format the drive in such a way that it appears in the boot menu? When installing Linux, I created a Primary Partition (ext4 format) and Swap Area on the drive. I'm not really sure where to go from here? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

Would this have anything to do with the UEFI system on this machine. In the Boot menu, I have UEFI enabled which says it supports UEFI and legacy OS. If it is disabled, it only supports legacy OS.

I just tried to install Linux on my secondary HDD and have the same problem. That does not appear in the Boot menu either. How can I get the machine to recognise these devices on startup?

 

dcoakley, were you installing the bootloader onto the hdd? I have a series 5 which is set up the same way. I had to install grub onto sda even though the OS was installed to the issd which is sdb. As far as I know, you'd have to edit the BIOS to tell it to boot directly from a device that's not enabled in from the factory (the issd).

 

Better stay off the iSSD if you are not in Windows. Because the iSSD was intentionally being control by software in Windows for caching, not for booting so they disabled the boot function of it. Although it is better if we can install it into the iSSD, it is really hard to be managed.

 

The BIOS is very limited and does not seem to allow for iSSD boot.

 

Thanks for the replies guys. Yes I was installing Linux directly onto the HDD. I did not do a separate GRUb install - is this necessary. I tried to enable the Hard-drive and iSSD in the BIOS boot menu but they don't seem to appear in the options. Is there something I need to change in order for them to appear.

Thanks

 

You can probably install grub onto the MBR of your hard drive that normally boots, and set the root target as the iSSD. It will probably be seen as hd1. As long as it is seen as a normal disk by the BIOS, you will be able to use it to run your OS.

 

When I said edit the BIOS, I meant you'd have to rewrite it. My bad there. You're stuck with booting from whatever it shows you in the menu. Install Grub onto the primary hard drive.