SSD upgrade issue - Cannot see hard drive

[Edgemaster1]

Hello everyone,

So I got this laptop from a friend of mine used for a good price because it had some problems.  Me being PC savvy, was able to fix the issue as it was just a bad virus.  The laptop originally had Windows 8 installed, I wiped it and installed my copy of Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit.  I then bought a SSD  (Kingston SSDnow 240GB) to upgrade the laptop and replace the painfully slow 5400 rpm SATA drive.  I went to do another fresh install but under drive options in the windows installer it did not show the drive.  I removed the drive and then installed it into the drive dock on my desktop rig and I was able to initialize, partition, and format the drive fine so I knew the drive was not DOA.  After formatting it on the drive dock I put it back into the laptop and still will not see the drive.  So I began my search.  I found many articles on the issue, some said you cannot use it because HP locks you out of the advanced bios options to enable AHCI.  I have seen other articles like the one here (http://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Hardware-Upgrades-Replacements/How-to-upgrade-your-notebook-to-a-SATA-2...) that seem to indicate that it can be done as AHCI should be the default option enabled in the locked out options in the bios. I tried that and it did not work.  I also did an exact sector by sector clone of the SATA drive to the new SSD and no matter what the laptop will not read the SSD when installed.  This is extremely annoying to me as I really like this laptop but find that after the fast CPU that it has the the 6GB memory and Radeon 7660 graphics, a terribly slow 5400 rpm hard drive was chosen for this unit which really slows it down.  If there is anything I can do to get the SSD installed and working I am willing to try and would appreciate any help that anyone could offer.

Thank you everyone

[Huffer]

Does the SSD show up in the BIOS? Odds are the problem is that the storage controller is in RAID mode not simple ahci. ahci is part of the RAID controller so do not worry about that and pull your hair out trying to enable ahci. It cannot be disabled on that system if you tried. You need the Intel F6 RAID driver to install during Windows 7 installation.

https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/25165/Intel-Rapid-Storage-Technology-Intel-RST-RAID-Driver

Pick the 64 bit F6 driver on this list (I assume your Win7 Ult is 64 bit), put it in a thumb drive and unzip it and point the installer to it when it cannot find a hard drive. The driver will load and voila! your drive will appear.

Do you also have the mSSD accelerator drive? You will have to deal with that in some way, too. If you are going to run a 2.5 inch SATA OS drive then you do not need the mSSD accelerator.

If this is "the Answer" please click "Accept as Solution" to help others find it.

[Edgemaster1]

Huffer,

Thank you for the reply.  I will be able to try this later when I am home from work.  I am experienced with raid configuration and drivers as I have worked with them in the past.  I will say however that when initially installing Windows 7 on the 5400 RPM SATA drive, it saw the drive with no drivers needed.  One would think if the raid controller was in raid mode it would need the driver installed regardless of what kind of SATA drive is being used as when I initially setup the raid with 2 SATA hdd's on my desktop rig, Win7 installation did not see them until i installed the raid driver for my mainboard.  This laptop was able to see the 5400 hdd with no driver necessary.

Also if it is infact a driver issue for the raid controller, how do I go about getting the laptop to see the drive now that the SSD is a functional clone of the hdd?  I do not wish to go through all of the re-install, reconfiguration all over again if I can avoid it.

[Huffer]

Well yes if you installed Windows 7 previously on a bare mechanical hard drive and it did not ask for a driver you are right. It should either ask for the driver or not on an SSD or a regular hdd. Also if you cloned the SSD off the hdd which was booting and running Windows 7, then there is really no way to add a driver before Windows should load. Does the laptop still boot from the old mechanical drive? Did you figure out whether an mSSD drive is installed?

[Edgemaster1]

OK, so I checked and from what I can see there is no mSSD installed in this laptop unless it is hidden where I cannot physically see it.  Also in my bios (InsydeH20 Ver F.34 Rev 3.7) there is no screen where it shows me what hard drives or disk drives it sees connected.  The only thing I can see are the boot options for either legacy or UEFI as far as what componnent it looks to boot from first. 

I am out of ideas and cannot for the life of me figure this out.  It does not make sense why I cannot get this SSD installed without all of these issues.  This is frustrating.

I am going to try the raid driver now just to see if by some miracle it works and will let you know.  In the meantime I am open to any other advise you can offer.

Thank you

[Edgemaster1]

OK, so I tried the raid driver and it still will not work.  After I figgured I'd do a clean install just to see if it would work so I wiped the SSD and reset it to out of the box setup.  I loaded up the Win7 install and as expected it did not see the drive.  I inserted my usb drive and loaded up the raid driver and it then saw the drive however, there was a message at the bottom of the screen reading "Windows cannot be installed to the selected drive (show details)".  So when I clicked on it a window opened that read "Windows cannot be installed to this disk.  The computer's hardware may not support booting to this disk.  Ensure that the disk's controler in enabled in the computer's BIOS menu."  Why is this?  This makes no sense to me.  I do not understand a computer that supports SATA not supporting a SATA drive unless the ports are bad which obviously this one is not as the mechanical HDD works fine with no issues.  I was able to create a primary partition but it did not create the normally seen "system reserved" partitions and I still got the "Windows cannot be installed to this drive" message.  I tried for the heck of it to format the newly made partition and got an error for that too that read "Unable to format the selected partition.  [Error: 0x80070057].

Please is there a way to get this SSD working?

[Edgemaster1]

Hello Everyone,

Just checking in on this as I have not had a response in a while.  This is a looming issue which I would still like to fix very much.  Please don't give up on me as I am out of options and any advise would be helpful.

Thank you again

[Edgemaster1]

Is there nobody here that can assist me with this issue??

[Huffer]

I just had a customer come into the computer shop where I spend my Saturdays. He had purchased an SSD online. We could not get it to work and it was behaving just as you describe. I happened to have another one with me and we tried it and voila! it worked. Some SSDs just do not play nice with certain computers. We have had issues here several times with the Crucial MX series of SSDs. Still not sure why. 

[Edgemaster1]

Well that still doesn't make sense to me.  I do not have another SSD laying around to try anmd Don't wanmt to spend any m,ore money on a chance.  Is there anyway for me to know if a particular SSD will work?