Lenovo Y500 won't recognize new mSATA drive

S

Shocked

Limp Gawd
Joined
Nov 1, 2009
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373
I got a 256GB Crucial m4 mSATA drive to stick in this thing... did so, secured it with a screw, replaced the bottom laptop cover and booted into Windows 8 (which is still loaded on the 1TB HDD that came with the system).

It doesn't appear to see the SSD at all. Not in Windows explorer, not in disk management. Is there something I'm missing? There don't appear to be too many options in BIOS.
 
Did you ever find the answer to this? I'm subscribed to this thread. I ordered a Y500 last night without the mSATA cache SSD and my feeling is I will probably encounter the same question.
 
mine was found in disk management and I just had to give it a label and then format it. Unfortunately there is pretty much no way to install windows because lenovo thought it would be a great idea to not include a windows 8 product key with this laptop.
 
Anticommon said:
mine was found in disk management and I just had to give it a label and then format it. Unfortunately there is pretty much no way to install windows because lenovo thought it would be a great idea to not include a windows 8 product key with this laptop.
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Oh. That's good news. It sounds like you just needed to initialize the drive. Which msata drive did you use? And was it hard to install? Did you end up using the msata drive as cache through Intel Rapid Storage?
 
Mine wouldn't even show up in BIOS, but just randomly started working a few days after I posted this.

I'm still trying to work out migrating my installation to the SSD. There appears to be a method where you can use Onekey Recovery but it seems overly complicated. I tried cloning the drive, but now both drives just boot directly into the recovery console (and I can't use recovery on the SSD because it's not partitioned exactly like the drive the laptop shipped with, and when I try it on the HDD it tells me it can't because the drive is locked).

So, I don't know. I don't have a physical copy of Windows 8 I can use to install it fresh, and it appears you can only use retail keys to (re)download it from Microsoft.
 
Shocked said:
Mine wouldn't even show up in BIOS, but just randomly started working a few days after I posted this.

I'm still trying to work out migrating my installation to the SSD. There appears to be a method where you can use Onekey Recovery but it seems overly complicated. I tried cloning the drive, but now both drives just boot directly into the recovery console (and I can't use recovery on the SSD because it's not partitioned exactly like the drive the laptop shipped with, and when I try it on the HDD it tells me it can't because the drive is locked).

So, I don't know. I don't have a physical copy of Windows 8 I can use to install it fresh, and it appears you can only use retail keys to (re)download it from Microsoft.
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I'm very interested to see what you end up doing. I'll be in the exact same boat. Lenovo doesn't ship recovery media. I guess you can create a recover USB thumb drive from the recovery partition but the USB thumb drive must be 16GB or greater. I'm not sure that recover media would work to restore to a SSD anyway.

At any rate, I don't want have a 16GB or greater USB thumb drive and I don't want to pay Lenovo for recovery media. (I'm not sure you could use the recovery you can get from technical support to recover to a SSD either.) Both would be minor expenses but it would be a hassle. I miss the old days when the company you bought Windows from gave you retail Windows media. I guess that hasn't really happened since Windows 98 or 2000 but I still miss it.
 
Coda said:
I'm very interested to see what you end up doing. I'll be in the exact same boat. Lenovo doesn't ship recovery media. I guess you can create a recover USB thumb drive from the recovery partition but the USB thumb drive must be 16GB or greater. I'm not sure that recover media would work to restore to a SSD anyway.

At any rate, I don't want have a 16GB or greater USB thumb drive and I don't want to pay Lenovo for recovery media. (I'm not sure you could use the recovery you can get from technical support to recover to a SSD either.) Both would be minor expenses but it would be a hassle. I miss the old days when the company you bought Windows from gave you retail Windows media. I guess that hasn't really happened since Windows 98 or 2000 but I still miss it.
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I've tried the the recovery method with a USB drive. It doesn't work and complains because it knows the SSD isn't partitioned exactly the same way as the factory drive. There's supposedly a way around this, but I haven't figured it out yet (that 800+ GB partition obviously isn't going to fit on the 256GB SSD so I don't know how exactly you would go about duplicating it...).

I asked on the Lenovo forums a few days ago and the links I got confused me more than they did help, honestly:

http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/IdeaPad...y-on-an-SSD/m-p/957349/highlight/false#M72963
 
just for future reference to solve the activation issue when adding a msata drive just install something like Macium Reflect free addition and clone the stock internal hard drive to the msata drive "of course you will want a drive bigger than 16gb to do this"

Once cloned select the msata as the boot device in the bios.
 
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