Yet another SSD PC upgrade blog :)

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So today I decided to upgrade the Hard drives / SSD in my rig. I ran into an error that I have not seen before and and thought posting about it might save someone a headache in the future. This is not my first time using an SSD or upgrading a machine to use one.

I have a Crucial 128GB SSD, a WD Caviar black 1TB and another 640GB caviar black (what was in my machine). I used the SSD as boot and for things like Office, Visual Studio, etc... I kept my games and most files on the 1TB drive and the 640GB was partitioned for Fraps videos and as a local backup of all my files.

I picked up a 500GB Samsung 840 EVO SSD on Cyber Monday and decided I would use that as my C: drive and use the smaller 128GB SSD for steam games and such.

Also, since I have all my files / docs that I care about backed up onto an external drive I decided to format all my old drives and just start fresh (hey why not?). I used CCLeaner to wipe the drives over night in case anyone cares (although I doubt it :/)

***Important bit below***

However after I installed Win 7 Professional 64bit on my 500GB SSD I was not able to format all the old drives. Windows had placed important Boot files on my Fraps (640GB WD Caviar Black) Drive, even although I explicitly told it to install on the new Samsung SSD.

Wow what a pain in the bum! I thought as I started to Google the problem of not being able to format / wipe my old recovery files and mostly pointless fraps videos. I came across some threads on Technet and Tom's hardware (community input) and found that Windows just does that sometimes (cause lolz).

To confirm I pulled out my 640GB WD and low and behold, It didn't boot although the OS itself wasn't installed there.

***What I did to fix it***

Pulled out all my drives EXCEPT my 500GB Samsung SSD and did a clean install with only that drive connected to sata power / data cables.

I hope this may save someone a headache one day, that's the only reason I wrote it. If it helps you, Fantastic! If not then that's OK too.

I'm actually writing this as I reinstall Win7 and Office 2013 :/ but hey, at least it gave me something to do while I wait for all the updates.

 

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Like the Look of your Build.

SSD FTW!!!

But anyways, Harddisk management (OS) is always the bane of me.

I usually divide the harddisk to partition via free partition tools.But it doesn't solve the OS problem.

That's really the only trick I know.

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Thanks!

I don't have any experience with partitioning software, can you recommend one? I usually just use Windows Disk Manager.

The problem really was that Win7 chose a (seemingly) random partition to add files too. Odd I thought. I don't know if Win8 has this problem.

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This example you posted is why I always tell everyone to unhook all other drives when doing upgrades and fresh installs, have seen this happen with almost every OS over the years at some point or another.

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I hadn't ever seen it before myself, perhaps I just never noticed although the first time I put an SSD boot drive in a machine I don't think I had this problem.

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Well, I'm using MiniTool Partition Wizard Home Edition, Partition Magic is ok too.

There's a youtube tutorial using disk manager and command prompt to do this to.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5RE0ZefrOg

also

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_vista-system/how-to-change-bootable-partition/907c92bc-67ff-469c-8cd9-73e86f647de0

 

I'm really not the expert on this.

In your case, you have to format the partition that you wanna install the OS in and use the command prompt to do that. I think i only know that much.

 

 

 

7

Well thanks for sharing this information!

Just so you know, I have solved my issue of installing the OS and formatting / wiping my drives.

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Well, anyway I'm glad to help :D

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+1 for the SSD upgrade.

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Thanks