Can i add a 500 GB Samsung 860 Evo SSD to my Pavilion DV7 Notebook

[PaulinHG]

Can I add  a 500GB Samsung 860 Evo SSD to my  notebook as a bootable drive & make the supplied 1TB HDD my secondary drive? My DV7 was supplied with a 1TB Toshiba HHD in the Primary drive bay. It has about 350-400Mb of used space, including the OS. The second drive bay is empty.

The user/maintenance manual indicates these drive bays as 'Primary' and 'Secondary'. I'm not sure if this means the bootable drive has to reside in the Primary drive bay.

My plan was simply to add the SSD into the second, empty bay, and clone the HDD contents onto the SSD using the Samsung supplied sotware. I have done something similar to my desktop PC (not HP) about a year ago and it was straight forward.

I am a little unsure however if the procedure would be the same in this notebook due to system restrictions eg the maintenance manual suggests a 160GB SSD is the maximum you can use. However I know from other posts in this forum that that is simply wrong and is down to legacy data.

Any help/guidance would be appreciated.

Many Thanks,

Paul

[iomare · Accepted solution]

Hi Paul,

There should not be any problem installing the SSD. You can perform the action you suggested and clone the primary drive onto the SSD and then swap the drive into the primary drive slot and put the mechanical drive in the secondary slot. The limit of 160GB indicates what the PC could have come with when bought and not the actual capacity supported.

Personally I prefer performing a clean install of the OS on the SSD and then insert the mechanical drive in the secondary slot and remove the Windows partition.

Hope it helps,

David

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[PaulinHG]

Many thanks for your prompt reply David.

My notebook came with Win 7 pre-installed  and therefore no installation media. The hard drive supplied was 1TB  with one main partition (about 950GB) which includes the Windows and Program files folders and all my data plus small recovery and HP Tools partitions. I also created a set of repair disks (5 DVDs!) Other than that I'm not sure how I would create a new install as you suggest with what I have. I have always had installation media with previous desktops and laptops I have owned.

I did install Windows 10 when it was first launched but I had all sorts of problems including Fatal Start Menu Errors or something similar. I perservered for about 3 1/2 weeks until time was running out before I would not have been able to revert to Win 7. Basically I chickened out and gave up with Win 10 which was a shame because I really liked it.

With regards to swapping the SSD and HDD around, would the SSD automatically become drive 'C' and consequently the bootable drive or would I have to go into the Bios to set up the boot order/sequence?