M1210 and SSD Multiboot XP, XP two hard drives

I have a dell M1210 which I plan on customising so that it uses a 32GB mIDE Samsung SSD AND 200GB SATA 7200rpm Hitachi Travelstar 7k200 at the same time. Usually, you have a SATA HDD and a mIDE DVD-RW. I bought an aftermarket 2nd Hard drive bay adaptor which slots in lieu of the DVD-RW drive and it is a 2.5" IDE (where the SSD drive slots in) to a laptop IDE connector ( the trapezium connector). Problem is, the Dell BIOS does not boot from SSD. So a solution I have is to boot from SATA HDD, where BIOS reads boot.ini , and then trigger the SSD to load XP. How do I go about doing this? Does this involve editing the boot.ini file in the XP installed on the SATA HDD? In what order do I install the OSs on each hard drive. Thanks!

 

If anyone is interested I have a working M1210 now with SSD and SATA HDD on vista, working MediaDirect.

 

how much did that cost, and are you seeing performance benefits?

 

fairly expensive- the 32GB IDE SSD was $570. Regards performance benefits- the differences are noticeable and noticeably faster than my 200GB 7200rpm 7k200 travelstar but write speeds are excruciatingly slow. Which benches are you interested in knowing- I can do it for both the SSD and SATA.

 

I suppose I wonder what would happen if you just booted and ran the OS off the SSD. I considered getting a "cheap" 8 gig ssd just for this.

 

You need to have the boot partition in the SATA hard disk, meaning to install another OS there probably, but you can configure the SSD OS as default. Also, you cannot have MediaDirect on the SSD, so MediaDirect needs to be instaklled on the SATA drive.

So if you go for SSD, and its IDE SSD, you need SATA HDD. If you go for SATA SSD to replace SATA HDD, you also get quick boot times and instant Media Direct.

When I installed the SSD it is recognised in the BIOS as a media bay device, and theres no boot option for media bay device ( where the DVD drive was), however, when I attacht he dell DVD drive externally via USB with some adaptor, and choose boot via DVD, it boots via the CD DVD drive. So it doesnt matter where the DVD drive is, USB or media bay, the BIOS recognises it. But that poses a problem in that Media Bay Device specifically (such as a SSD residing there) is not bootable.

So the benefit of the startup speed otherwise gained from an SSD is somewhat negated, though over time, as the PC usually becomes slower in SATA, this wont happen with SSD. Ive noticed it to be more responsive, and as the hard drive is the slowest component of any PC, Id rather remove the bottleneck. Its a shame that the IDE SSD doesn't confer the same advantages as the SATA SSD, but at least I have the benefit of storage space with the 200GB SATA HDD.

 

Hi all,

Im new to this forum.
I want to thank you for all your contributions to this forum. You seem very knowledgeable.
Kindly asking if you can answer my following question please. Its not out of topic but its out of "this" particular topic.
Owning and loving an M1210, will an OCZ OCZSSD2-1S32G 32GB Solid State SATA II Drive work on my laptop ?? is my laptop compatible with SATA2 ?? Is it a good drive to buy ?? if not, do you recommend any other drives that might be faster but within the same price range ??

Thank You so much for the replies in advance.