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XPS 8700 - New mSata wont boot unless...
I've had my 8700 for a little over a year and from the start I put a 256gb 2.5 SSD and all has been well... unfortunately I've ran out of room so I got a 512gb mSata and have installed it with the normal hiccups, (adjusting the bios etc) and for the most part it works great... installed win7 - all my programs, games media and all that. Well now that I have everything on there I was trying to format the original 1tb hdd that served as the original boot drive (later converted to my games drive) and it refuses to format "windows cannot format the system partition on this disk" So i went into BIOS and noticed its listed 1st in order of the boot sequence. OK... so I set the mSata as the first on the boot sequence and disabled the other 2 HDD's from the boot sequence... unfortunately after doing that it wont boot up , saying No boot device available. I've tried other settings and the only way i can get my OS to load is if i set it to AHCI - Legacy - then set my empty 1tb (deleted the games manually) as the 1st boot device and set my msata #2. I want to use the 1TB in another computer and i want all my available bays open for bigger storage drives when I have the need... but most of all i want to solve it because it needs solving.... Anyone have any idea what I'm doing wrong? any help is appreciated.
relevant specs:
XPS 8700
i7-4770
BIOS A10
Crucial m550 mSata
OS was originally win 8.1 ... I upgraded to win 7 home
Mary G
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June 7th, 2015 10:00
The boot sequence is dynamic so it doesn't matter if you change it in the bios. Each item listed will be searched for boot files according what is currently installed. Since your boot files are not on the ssd, it will never boot to that drive. Windows needs to be installed on the ssd from scratch so you will lose everything and must reinstall it all. If what you have now works well, leave it alone and save yourself a lot of trouble. The boot files are still on the original drive.
max faded
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June 9th, 2015 23:00
Figured it had to be something related to the HDD being the original boot drive... I wish I could have taken your advice and just let it be cuz I lost a few weeks of documents and all my saved games due to me being in a hurry to get restarted but having it done right is the ultimate goal... anyways thank you for your reply!
Unplugged the storage drives, re installed the OS on the mSata and all is working how it should now :)