I'm trying to resolve the enduring hard-disk performance issues in my missus' laptop. She has a Samsung R510 running Vista. I want to replace the hard disk with an OCZ Agilty SSD. I had endless problems building Win7 in place in the laptop and no amount of fiddling with AHCI settings etc managed to get past the point of Windows saying "Windows cannot be installed onto this Disk. This computer's hardware may not support booting to this disk. Ensure that the disk's controller is enabled in the Computer's BIOS menu". After a lot of Googling around this it appeared that this was a largely spurious message and that it would be possible to build the disk in another machine and then install it, which I did. Having now installed the SSD, the machine sees the SSD but refuses to boot from it, for no readily obvious reason (it says it can't find a boot device). The laptop has been flashed with the latest BIOS driver. The drive is currently configured for AHCI mode. At the moment, the prediction of "may not support booting to this disk" is proving pretty accurate! Any bright ideas how I can get past this?
I had a samsung lappy to fix a month or so back and it did this, would not play ball with AHCI enabled no matter what drivers I tried to feed it at the windows 7 setup. In the end I cheated and installed it with ide then found a guide on google to install the AHCI drivers afterwards, involved a bit of reg editing but it worked fine.
Thanks for that - that at least gives me some comfort that (a) it's not just something I've bolloxed up and (b) that there exists a route to fixing it
Most laptop bios are setup to reject 3rd party drives. Usually if you own a Samsung laptop a Samsung ssd would be your best bet. This maybe part of your problem.
