Adding an MSATA as primary driveto HP envy with HDD as storage

[XrayLemi]

Hello all,

I'm sorry to be long winded, But I want to be as thorough as I can be.

This relates to a previous problem titled  "HP ENVY 17-j017sg mSATA & 2xHDD"   It was posted on 2/13/14.

This has to do with a work around to use an msata as the c-drive.   On page 2 member RaymanForever listed in detail his 25 steps to get this to work.  I'm stuck.

My original HDD died, and I replaced it with a 256Gb msata.  I insatalled windows 7 64bit fresh on the msata with no issues.  When the HDD is added I get the  "No bootable device - insert boot disk and press any key" message.  As the original post states this is to be expected.  I know from the post, the HDD needs to be formatted, with an EFI partition for the bootloader to get it to go to the MSATA where the OS is.

My problem comes from...... 

         When the HDD is installed, I cannot get the bootloader onto the HDD because I cannot access the HDD.  It shows up on the device manager, it shows when I hit escape and hit f2 in system diagnostics.  It shows when I start the computer and hit "CTRL I".   Physical device I.D. 0 is the HDD - Device I.D. 1 is my samsung EVO MSATA.

The HDD dosen't show up on My Computer, or as an option when hitting F9 for boot options. 

I'm hoping That I am just missing something obvious.  Maybe because I didn't clone the drive just did a fresh install?

Thanks in advance,

Jim

[iomare · Accepted solution]

Take a look at this guide, hope it helps,

http://woshub.com/how-to-repair-deleted-efi-partition-in-windows-7/

Did you install windows 7 on the msata as efi?

David

[XrayLemi]

Ok David here goes,

I did a ton of research with the info you gave me.  At one point I even got my system to boot, although clumsily.  Like it was trying to boot then it stopped and started again.  The way i did it also really screwed with my mcafee anti virus.  So in short nothing I did that you gave me worked. Nothing on the post "HP ENVY 17-j017sg mSATA & 2xHDD" posted on 2/13/14 worked either.  But David, you pointed me in the right direction for research.  

I'm fortunate that both drives were new so I had nothing to loose.

I put both drives in, booted from the Windows 7 disk with the UEFI option and did the following.

1) At the choose language screen I hit "shift + F10" to get the CMD interface.

2)  Cleaned both drives.

3) converted both drives to GPT

4} On Drive 1 (my 256Gb MSATA) I formatted it as one big NTFS drive for my C-drive.  Nothing else

5) On Drive 0 (my 500 Gb HDD) I first created a 300 mb system partition.  Formatted as fat32 label=System and

      assigned letter=S

      I made this partition 300Mb because it is a 4k sector drive so it had to be 300Mb not 100Mb

6) Next on drive 0, I added the 128Mb msr partition. No format no letter.

7) Finally, on drive 0, I created a primary drive formatted as NTFS   labeled as Data and assigned Letter D

When I hit next on the windows install I chose to install windows on the MSATA partition.  When The installation was done, I was able to power off and restart lightning fast no issues.

I also ran DISKMGMT.MSC and verified on Disk 1 had only 232,76 Gb Primary partition C:   On C: is Boot, Page file, Crash Dump, Primary partition.

On Disk 0 are 300 Mb EFI system partition (no letter-system hidden) and 465 Gb  Primary partition 😧 

My McAfee anti virus is also working perfectly.

So, I can consider this case closed.  I know it might not be the right way but it worked for me.

Thanks,

Jim