How to upgrade your notebook to a SATA 2.5" SSD

[gospelmidi]

Hello Sparkles1, Thank you for the tutorials, for those of us who have Intel, Samsung, or OCZ SSDs. I have a new HP 15-f039wm and a new 240GB Chronos G2 SSD, or they were new before I began attempting to install the SSD in the HP 15-f039wm. The new Chronos G2 works perfectly as a boot/system drive in my desktop. The SSD also works great as an external drive, wrapped in a Tripp-Lite external case with USB 3.0 adapter, with which I cloned the HP HDD, with a little help from Acronis 2014. But when I put the Chronos G2 SSD inside the laptop as the boot/system drive, the HP does not power up - no beep, no blink, no boot, zilch, nada, nil. Whether by land or by AC or by charged-up battery, the electrical power stays OFF. I put the original Seagate HDD back in the HP 15-f039wm, and all is peachy-keen again. And yes, I have done the 15 second hard reset with no power, but ... no.

[erico]

Installing a different hard disk will not affect your warranty.

If you have to send the unit in for warranty service, remove the non OEN hard disk and upgrade RAM if some was installed.

Send the notebook in for repair in the configuration it was in when it was delivered to you.

No, there is not an exception for RAM. If you send your notebook in with additional RAM, it will probably be removed during troubleshooting. If you don't remove it , you may not see it again and it won't be HP's fault.  

[erico]

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@KINGxENVY wrote:
"The recovery manager requires the drive to be the same." What do you mean by that

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If your plan is to use the HP recovery media, the upgrade(replacement) hard disk, whether SSD or legacy spinner, needs to be 160 Gb or more capacity.

If you plan to use the method I described in my original reply to this post, then the SSDcan be smaller. The cloning software will shrink the clone to fit the drive, if possible. Acorn and Paragon cloning software are both capable of that.

[gospelmidi]

erico wrote, "The cloning software will shrink the clone to fit the drive, if possible. Acorn and Paragon cloning software are both capable of that." Acronis True Image 2014 can also proportionately shrink partitions to fit. But I wonder whether the 1MB offset for trim will still function for trim if it is shrunk by 20% or 50%. If I were designing cloning software, I think I would choose to keep the very small boot partition(s) and the system partition the same as those in the original drive, then use the rest for what remains on the HDD. But then, I'm not designing anything, so that's all hypothetical.

[erico]

There could be an issue with the Chronos SSD. Consider entering the BIOS and enabling legacy support and then try booting again. Contact Mushkin and explain that you are having an issue.

Did you prep the drive and ensure that the latest firmware is installed? Go back beyond Sparkle's posts  and look at the original responses in this thread.

Do you actually have an issue? What is with the ramblings about the design considerations? We are not here to talk about that. We responded to this thread to actually help a real person.

[gospelmidi]

Re: a new HP 15-f039wm, BIOS F.02, and a new 240GB Chronos G2 SSD which has no updates available.

I have set the HP BIOS F.02 (latest) to legacy, but the BIOS states that it MUST attempt EFI boot before

legacy boot, and EFI boot cannot be disabled.  I disabled or turned off all BIOS security settings.

Acronis True Image 2014 set up the SSD to match the internal HDD partitions and set the active partition.

I chatted at some length with Chronos about the apparent incompatibility and no power issue. We tested

to determine that the SSD works perfectly, EXCEPT when it is installed INSIDE the HP 15-f039wm laptop.

1. The new Chronos G2 works with my desktop as a boot/system drive or as an external drive, no worries.

2. I successfully cloned the 15-f039wm HDD to the SSD in a USB 3.0 SATA case with Acronis True Image 2014.

3. When I put the Chronos G2 SSD INSIDE the laptop as the boot/system drive, the laptop does not power up -

no beep, no blink, no boot, zilch, nada, nil.  The electrical power stays OFF.

4. When I put the original Seagate HDD back in the HP 15-f039wm, the laptop works as it did before the swap.

Chronos will replace my G2 SSD with a different 1/4 GB SSD, if HP will specify a known compatible Chronos SSD.

I apologize for discussing "design considerations."  I merely need to know if the offset for trim will still work

if cloning software proportionally shrinks the offset to less than 1 MB.

Thank you for your assistance.

gospelmidi

[erico]

I notice that you did not answer my question. You did not try prepping the drive with the DiskPart utility that is part of the Windows OS. 

I would not have purchased a Mushkin SSD. The more popular units , according to the review websites are Samsung, Intel and more well known names such as OCZ. I have never had an issue with any of those brands.

I find it difficult to see the notebook as the cause when I have not seen a thread like this from any other member. The statistics point to the SSD. I will ask HP about this issue for you. Please be patient, as it will take a few days for the company to respond.

[gospelmidi]

With DISKPART, I tried to replicate the Recovery primary partition with 1024 KB offset, the 260 MB FAT32 system partition, the 128 MB MSR partition, and the rest of the drive in two primary partitions, Windows (204.85 GB) and Recovery (17.70 GB).  It looked good, but as soon as I cloned the hard disk to the SSD, it wiped out everything I had done and put the 128 MB MSR partition with a 17 KB offset as the first partition.

So prepping the disk with DISKPART is apparently wiped out by the cloning processs, but that may be better than the "no power" state that I had before using DISKPART.  I'll see another day.  This one job has taken WAY too much time already.

[gospelmidi]

Still no power with Chronos G2 SSD inside. I hereby pronounce a legal separation of the Chronos G2 SSD from the HP 15-f039wm for reason of irreconcilable incompaitibility.  I can swap this (Made in USA) Chronos G2 SSD for a different (Made in USA) Chronos SSD directly from the U.S. manufacturer.  Can anyone recommend a Chronos SSD which is known to be compatible with an HP Series 15 laptop?

IMHO, the best - and certainly the easiest and most straightforward - way to clone a laptop HDD to an SSD is this:

PUT BOTH DRIVES INSIDE A DESKTOP AND BOOT FROM THE CLONING SOFTWARE BOOTABLE MEDIA (CD/DVD/USB stick).

The Acronis Backup 2014 strongly suggests that one put the new SSD in the interior HDD bay and install the old HDD as a USB drive; then boot from the Acronis CD and backup the HDD.  However, this can't work if putting the Chronos G2 SSD in the interior HDD bay prevents the laptop from powering up.

But not to worry.  In my desktop PC, I added the Chronos G2 SSD as an internal AHCI drive.

DISKPART

SELECT DISK 1

CLEAN

CONVERT GPT

I shutdown Windows 8.1 and connected the laptop HDD in place of my desktop HDD.

Then I booted Acronis Backup 2014 from CD and selected Tools and Clone Disk.

I chose "Automatic", which cloned the HDD to the SSD perfectly, as far as I can tell.

But even a perfectly cloned Chronos G2 SSD still wouldn't allow the laptop to power up.

[erico]

"But not to worry.  In my desktop PC, I added the Chronos G2 SSD as an internal AHCI drive."

Did you set it as your boot drive?

I would wait until I had success to report before making any statements regarding the best and easiest way to do somthing.