Elitebook 8640p won't boot after replacing hard drive with a M4 128Gb crucial drive

[excalibur1814]

Hello all,

This morning I un-boxed a new Elitebook 8640p and instantly replaced the hard drive with a new M4 128Gb crucial drive.

The machine setup a clean install of windows, restarted etc. I then installed the drivers, restarted etc. Did a windows index score and I was instantly impressed with the 7.9 but...

The laptop will no longer boot. Just after the initial laptop screens it simply stops on a black screen where it should show the 'windows' logo. I put the original hard drive back in and the machine boots fine and I put the M4 into my desktop and it starts to boot.

So it seems that the drive is fine and the laptop is fine but together... Nope.

Any suggestions?  (I feel like sending both back as after spending this much money things should work like clockwork)

[Mumbodog]

Try a startup repair, use F8 at the HP splash screen, then select "Repair your Computer" from the list, run a startup repair.

It may take up to 3 rstartup repairs before it boots sucessfully.

[excalibur1814]

Nope, that won't work.  I clean installed and the machine booted fine (no drivers) until the next boot.

- The machine will sometimes boot (major tweaking) in 20 seconds to desktop

- The machine will sometimes sit at the initial first screen for ages and then boot

- The machine will sometimes sit at the initial screen and not do anything

- The machine will sometimes sit at the initial screen and then change to a screen with white blocks and then reset

- The machine will sometimes sit there, press escape, F9, select HD and then it boots.

The machine mostly boots fine with the standard hard drive. The Crucial M4 will boot every time when used on my desktop (Another clean install).

So... I think I'll return the machine

[excalibur1814 · Accepted solution]

Solution:  It seems that Crucial have messed up again

http://forum.crucial.com/t5/Solid-State-Drives-SSD/Problem-with-boot-on-SSD-crucial-M4-256Go-on-ASUS...

[Slym]

Crucial did mess up. HP surely did.

I have the exact same problem (except I could not even install Windows on my disk because BIOS detect once every 50 eboots).

My laptop is a brand new HP 6560b and I tried to install a Crucial SSD M4 128GB.

What tells me that it's HP's fault is that I also tried with a OCZ Vertex 3 128GB and had the same problem.

HP Team, please release a new BIOS with a fix for SSDs !

[mmsiecom]

Hi, I have same problem. Brand new boxed Intel 320 series 300gb SSD. I found that once i press F9 on initalpost to bring up Boot Menu (may be different key for others) From the Boot Menu I select Internal Notebook HDD and low and behold Windows loads and works normal with no errors and SSD passes all test. Oddly its only during normal boot that the BIO's seems to give a False Smart Error. So My advice is to try this (which is very annoying each time you must reboot) but it seems to work. good luck as it seems to be the only solution until HP updates the BIO's to correct this issue. Also I'm a bit curious as to if there is High verses Low Density drv issue and we need more knowledge of which SSD's work properly with our HP notebooks in general. would be nice if if compatibility list was on this forum.
HP Pavillion dv7-6154nr
AMD Phenom 970 Quad-Core
8gb DDR3 ram
Seagate Momentus XT 750gb Hybrid SSD/HDD
Intel 320 Series 300gb SSD
O/S Windows 7 Ultimate