HP EliteBook 8730w: SSD replacement for boot drive not recognized

[roymeboy · Accepted solution]

Hmmm.
Honestly footstep, I'm not happy with this one. If this was my machine, I'd be a bit concerned about whats round the corner. Given the age, its no surprise really, things wear out over time, simple fact of electronics.

From looking through everything you've posted, all pics, the pdf, all text double checking. I am absolutely baffled as to what happened. If you 100% didn't reseat the hard drive between the posts above where no HDD is detected on the boot options menu to the post below that where the HDD is detected in that same menu. I would say that you have a problem with either, the ssd, the laptop mainboard, or the small connector on the sata port, which I think on these is inbuilt to the motherboard so it sounds like your board is dodgy.
If its working now, great...but be aware that your machine may fail at some point in the near future. And given it looks like a motherboard fault, other things are probably waiting to fail.

There is no reason whatsoever your laptop shouldn't have seen this ssd on the very first boot. A HDD is a HDD, if its sata compatible, then it will work, no question. When it doesn't on an aged machine, its probably a sign of a failing component.

Looking through your bios options though, I would advise the following.

On boot options, get rid of pxe internal nic boot, that will only slow your machine down on boot as it'll be looking for a bootable network device. That is the message you get at startup saying Media Test Failure, that page is avoidable with that option disabled.
Under built in device options, also change lan/wlan switching to enabled. This means if you are using wifi at home for example and you decide to plug a network cable directly to the router to speed the connection up, it won't switch if this isn't set, you will have to do it manually. I work in a big enterprise and the amount of people who have this option off is unreal. They all assume when they are docked that they are going onto the wired connection.

As we're there too, if you ever get any problems with a flickering screen, first thing to try, is turn off the ambient light sensor which is just below that switching option. Its fine on normally, but its quite common on 8560p's for this to cause a flickering screen.

Hope all that has helped. Good luck in what you decide to do with the machine

[Footstep]

Hi @roymeboy,

Your gloomy prognosis seems appropriate on the basis of known events. Although there is no sign of instability at the moment, I'll anticipate possible failure by continuing my daily (at least) backups and retaining the original HDD intact in case the SSD proves to be dodgy. The fact that the SSD has never faltered when connected as an external USB drive, however, suggests it might not be the prime suspect.

I'm very grateful for the time and thought you've put into my puzzling situation, including your advice on BIOS settings. I'd like to credit your advice by accepting your comments as a solution. Even though suspicions remain about the state of my hardware, we have demonstrated, for anyone interested, that there is no fundamental incompatibility between the Samsung SSD 840 EVO 500 GB and the HP Elitebook 8730w. The Samsung data migration application can clone both partitions on the original HDD and the 8730w can recognize the SSD installed in the original HDD bay. Once in place, the SSD provides a very spritely experience, even with the limitation of a SATA 2 connection.

I'll enjoy the sunshine while it lasts.

 Many thanks to you for your essential contribution and to danko358 for also taking an interest.

[HeyBirdDog]

Hewlett-Packard HP EliteBook 8740w Upgrade of HDD Boot Drive to SSD Boot Drive Can Work. Here's How.

My mission: upgrade the original 300 GB HDD hard drive that came with my HP EliteBook 8740w laptop to the Samsung 850 EVO 500GB SSD to use the SSD as the primary drive / boot device.
The included Samsung Data Migration Software CD will not work for this purpose because “OEM recovery partitions generated at the factory by computer manufacturers cannot be replicated.”
HP OEM software has multiple partitions that include a Recovery partition and a Tools partition. It’s my understanding, creating a clone boot drive using ordinary software (including Windows 7 system image backup) will not work to properly copy these partitions. [I’m sticking with Windows 7 Pro (and am not being forced into Windows 10 thanks to Never10) as I lost an entire week of my life trying to recover from a Windows 10 malfunction that stopped search functions.]
Acronis True Image 2016  worked great to accomplish the multiple partition boot drive cloning task. The CD I bought from Amazon in June 2016 is out of date and refers you to the Acronis website to download the current version. The 71 characters for the serial number you must enter appear on the paper included in the box. (You’d think we were launching a nuke.)
I attached the StarTech SSD/HDD - Hard Drive Adapter Cable to the SSD and plugged it into the USB port. Then I rebooted to the Acronis media which started right up. The Tools and Utilities tab on the Home page offers “Clone Mode” and “Automatic” which accomplished the migration perfectly.
Next, turn off the laptop, (remove the battery), remove the HDD from the chassis, separate the HDD from its holding “cage” by unscrewing the two screws on each side, and slide the SSD into the cage. (The two screws nearest the connection don’t seat deep enough on this SSD and make the cage too wide, so don’t use them; just use the remaining two.) Slide the cage into the chassis, and replace the chassis cover. (Replace the battery.)
It booted right up for me. At this point, the included Samsung CD can be installed to use the Magician software which enables RAPID Mode for up to 2x faster performance by utilizing unused PC memory (DRAM) as a high-speed cache. The newest version of Samsung Magician supports up to a 4 GB cache on a system with 16 GB of DRAM.
I am storing the HDD for any emergency rather than using it for backups should the SSD fail. I hope this review saves you all the hours I invested to learn how simple this can actually be.
P.S. If you upgrade your memory, you’ll have to remove the keyboard on this laptop, but I was able to fold it back and make the installation without disconnecting all the cables.