Unable to use both an M.2 drive and a SSD

[october3]

M.2 Drive and SSD drive will not coexist..

This is a strange one and I haven't seen it replicated on the forums. My laptop is an G1 840

What I am trying to do is to have a windows 7 64bit image on the M.2 drive, and use win 10 64bit on the SSD. The reason being I have work email come to outlook on the win7 image and also have some specific applications on there.

So I was able to get the M.2 drive up and running okay and initiate it in windows 7, after enabling M.2 in bios with max sata speed 6gb/s

I was then able to image the original conventional hard drive with the win7 installation to the M.2 drive and boot into it, but only after installing the microsoft update package: Windows6.1-KB2990941-v3-x64.msu

So far so good and I could happily boot into either M.2 or hard drive via the boot drive options

However, if my laptop has a crucial SSD as the internal hard drive then the M.2 drive does a blue screen of death

It will boot Ok with no hard drive present, so its not needing anything no on the M.2 drive to boot into the software

It boots fine with the conventional hard drive, a 7200rpm drive with or without the original win7 image

I have tried imaging the conventional drive exactly to the SSD to eliminate software but that does not work, and I have tried doing a new win 10 64bit installation to the SSD, and an older win10 image, but that does not work either

I am thinking there must be something I need to do to get the M.2 drive and the SSD drive to co-exist on the laptop

Has anyone run into this specific problem or can you suggest something to get them to play together?

To date I have tried multiple installs, but whenever I add the crucial SSD I get blue screen of death on the M.2 drive. Note that the SSD will boot into windows fine.

My M.2 drive is the TTCSUNBOW M.2 2242 240gb, and the SSD is the Crucial MX200

My fallback is to try dual boot win7/10 on the SSD and use M.2 for data but seems a waste......

Any help gratefuly received as I have spent ages looking throgh forums and google trying to get this to work. Thks.

[banhien]

@october3

The M.2 slot is for Intel Smart Response (ISR):

Join forces with the latest generation Intel® architecture and operate at peak performance levels with Intel Smart Response Technology for disk cache and expand total storage options with an additional mini-card SSD.

It is designed as cache to work with normal drive in RAID mode. Now your M.2 SSD has Windows, can it boot with an empty SSD ?

Regards.

[october3]

"..can it boot with an empty SSD ?..."

Sorry for delay, was testing this. No, does not work with an empty SSD, but it will boot with an empty conventional drive

Are you saying that it is not possible to have 2 windows installtions? I havent tried win10 on the M.2 and win7 on the SSD yet

thanks for your help

[Huffer · Accepted solution]

This laptop was one of the earliest to have any kind of an M.2 disk and as stated above, it is designed to be used for acceleration cache to speed up a mechanical drive using Intel Fast Response technology through the Intel Rapid Storage console. It makes a kind of RAID array with the mechanical drive. The laptop is also capable of using a larger  M.2 disk but only all by itself and not in conjunction with a mechanical drive where you try to make the M.2 a standalone boot disk. 

This was not that long ago but the hardware was kind of an evolutionary side-branch just before SSDs became widely available and affordable. It is making a kind of comeback now with Intel Optane but that uses the PCIe/NVME bus and not the SATA bus as on your laptop. 

The way I would try to do this is to install Windows 7 to the hard drive with the M.2 in the system, blank. After installation use Intel Rapid Storage to enable acceleration, which will set up the M.2 cache disk. It will need to create like a 32 gig "acceleration" partition on the M.2. The rest will be availble as storage. Do not create a RAID array using the Intel RAID preboot utility. After you get Windows 7 working then install Windows 10 as a dual boot. And then enable acceleration in Windows 10 just as you did in Windows 7. I would think this would have the best chance of making it possible to run a dual boot, but I think it is possible that the acceleration files on the M.2 for Windows 7 may interfere. It might be possible to put two acceleration cache partitions on the M.2 disk but I have never tried that . Put Windows 10 and Windows 7 on separate partitions on the hard drive. You need to have the storage controller set to RAID not AHCI. 

[october3]

Thanks for the reply and explanation

I have been barking up the worng tree then,  its a shame, but all is not lost.

I don't find the crucial SSD slow at all, so I think I'll either dual boot 10 and 7 there, or just even try and run 7 from USB drive

I can use the M.2 drive just for data, which will be handy to have

thks

[october3]

Just an update, for anyone in the same situation.......

I have found that I can easily dual boot windows 10 in my M.2 and my internal sata, which is very handy, and what I am now doing. 

We just select which drive to boot from when the PC turns on.