Forcing a laptop to boot from SSD?

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Ryokurin

[H]F Junkie
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Aug 14, 2001
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I recently purchased a HP Envy Touchsmart M6-K025dx that originally came with just a 750GB hard drive. When I opened it up to upgrade the memory I noticed that it had a mSATA port, so I decided to get a 250GB mSATA 840 Pro as well. The problem comes with trying to convince the system to boot from it. Apparently HP expected that port to be used as a raid/caching port only so they never put an option in the UEFI to boot from it. If I take the hard drive out the system will boot from the SSD but otherwise the system will only boot from a hard drive if it's installed.

I've ran into one thread elsewhere where a guy suggested using bootice to install the "Plop bootloader" which can be configured force the system to use the SSD but he also didn't leave any steps on how to set it up, other than it took him a couple of days to figure it out. Does anyone know if anything easier to try? Also, if it comes to it and I decide to format, does anyone know if the downloaded Windows 8 disc will recognize the SLIC code from the bios? I'm trying to avoid having to buy another license.
 
This might be a dumb question, but can't you just physically swap the drives?
 
Ok, I tried the first post's way with a brand new drive. If you read through the thread, HP changed their uEFI settings to force the system to look for the hard drive first, even if you install windows on the SSD like it describes.

I'm trying the rEFInd method that was discussed later, but I'm getting a similar result, actually I'm not even for sure if I'm installing it right since it's really is made for linux. Any other suggestions?
 
You said that without the HDD the laptop boots from the SSD fine. To me you just need to not have anything bootable on the HDD (no OS, no boot sector, no boot folder) and it should work.
 
Tried that with a brand new untouched drive. The uEFI just halts post and complains that the hard drive contains no data and you need to install an OS. the rEFInd program is basically a app that was supposed to redirect the uEFI to the SSD partition but most of the documentation is for Linux. Even reading the Windows info, it's clear it was written by someone who does not use windows as a lot of it is redundant or misleading.

For the time being, I'm just using 64gb of it as a caching drive and the rest as storage. Hopefully SSDs will keep dropping in price where it will make sense to put one in there and just ignore the mSATA port. Can't really justify a $400 SSD when I only paid $550 for the laptop.
 
Since the BIOS will not allow you to boot from the SSD directly, here is what to do in order to be able to boot from the SSD.

1. Install Windows on the HDD (may not actually need to really do this, but the drive will need to be bootable(active) and have the few files that Windows puts in the root of the drive.

2. Install Windows on the SSD.

3. Use BCDEDIT to change what partition/drive the computer boots from.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/ff542273(v=vs.85).aspx

4. You should then be able to delete the Windows and Program Files, etc. folder off of the HDD.
 
LOL.

Pull the factory HDD and you get a bootable mSATA - Yes????? Load an OS to it if you do.

Now put a DIFFERENT non-HP HDD in the bay and see if you still get a boot.



Google HP + DMI

When I used to be a HP tech, the systems and the HDD's were DMI tattooed.....
 
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