Ultra-Thin

[bheta]

Hello all, I am new to the forum.  Thank you in advance for your help.

I have the M5-481PT-6644 which came installed with win 8.  My HDD crashed and had to be replaced. While waiting on the RMA I upgraded my SSD to 128GB and installed win 7 (my win 8 copy went down the drain with the drive as did my recovery partition).  Computer works great with only SSD installed.

However, when I attach the new HDD, the BIOS only recognizes the empty HDD when both HDD and SSD are plugged in. In the boot order, only the HDD shows up.  If only the SSD is plugged in then it shows up on the boot menu.

My bios is InsydeH20 version 2.22 (ugraded from the 2.16).  If I disconnect the HDD, then it boots to Win 7 without any problems, but I would like to have both, for HDD data storage.  The bios sees SDD at SATA 1 but then when HDD is also plugged in, bios boots to HDD at SATA 0.  Any Ideas on how to get around this?  The Win 7 installation CD does see both drive. I could try to reinstall and disk clean both but I'm wondering if this would just continue to give the "No boot drive" error at start up as it may continue to only boot to the HDD at SATA 0.  My BIOS is set to legacy because I never figured out how to properly install with UEFI (but that's another long story). Also, does anyone know the motherboard on the M5-481PT-6644?

Thanks again.

[Acer-Blayn]

Unfortunately, I am not sure why the system will not boot when  you have both drives installed. Since Acer has not tested this configuration with the Windows 7 operating system you are using, I don't really have any suggestions you can try. I can tell you that the motherboard in the system is a proprietary board made for this Acer system.

Perhaps other community members who have attempted this configuration can provide some better suggestions.

[bheta]

Semi-Solved

I was able to sucessfully reinstall Win 7 on the SSD after running diskpart clean on the SSD and HDD. I ran from the installation with both drives plugged in.  I chose the SSD to install to and both drives were unallocated.  During intall after the first reboot it brought up the advanced start up option (alt f10) and I chose Win 7 to boot.  It seems as the installer was starting over and as I got to the screen, to pick the drive to install to,  I noticed that the ssd had data (and I believe the system 100 mb partition).  So I backed out of the install and rebooted.  Sure enough the installation started back up as it was originally halfway through and finished. Who hoo!

I was instructed on another forum to shut down after getting to the desktop and installation completed, removed the HDD and reboot.  Then shut down again, replug the HDD and reboot.  

However, when removing the HDD and restarting I received the error again about no boot drive.  So I replugged HDD in and it reboot fine. Turns out win 7 placed the 100 mb system partition on the HDD.  I'm not sure if that was accidentally or intentional as maybe it was recognizing the computer would not start without boot files on sata 0 (HDD).  Anyway, I'm not going to mess with it as thing are running great. I think the startup may be slightly slower (approx 15 sec) than when everything was on the SSD (approx 10 sec), but I can live with that.  If my HDD crashes though that may be another story as the boots files are there.  

Anyone have any thoughts on how to get both partitions on the SSD or not create the 100 MB partition during installation?  Thanks!