Samsung 256GB 830 not recognized by Windows 7 Installer

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incomudro

[H]ard|Gawd
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Aug 30, 2004
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Hey guys,

I'm trying to install my SSD. Samsung 830 256gb...

I have Win 7 on a USB drive that boots fine. However Windows 7 installer can't find it.

I have tried switching it from ATA to AHCI makes no difference. I've updated my bios to the newest and still nothing. The bios CAN see it just fine.

This is a Dell XPS 15 L502X. I can't really boot both drives and all that happy stuff. Hopefully someone knows a fix.


I am able to run disk part from the installer and it does see the drive.. I have tried to clean it but it doens't help at all. Would formatting it work ? I don't want to damage the SSD. I'm way out of the loop on this stuff.
 
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easy. windows 7 doesnt come with your laptop sata driver. either you've got to integrate the driver into a new windows 7 media, or you've got to download a pre-made one from somewhere, or you've got to put the driver on another media and point the windows 7 installer to it. then windows 7 installer will find your disks.

googled this up where they explain in painful detail how to install windows 7 on a dell computer. basically they extract the sata drivers to a usb stick. http://en.community.dell.com/suppor...ean-install-of-windows-7-on-dell-systems.aspx

if you don't want to or cant find the exact drivers, you can use the mass storage driver pack from driverpacks and upon pointing windows 7 to the extracted drivers, there is a good chance it will find the right one. http://driverpacks.net/driverpacks/latest


incomudro said:
Windows 7 installer can't find it.

I am able to run disk part from the installer and it does see the drive
Click to expand...

this part doesnt make sense to me. I think either the installer sees the drive or it doesn't.
 
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If I may chip in, I had the same experience with both a Samsung 830 and a Vertex 4. In both instances, I was able to get it to recognize the drives by adding them to a functional computer, upgrading or reflashing the firmware, then updating the BIOS in the target computers (both laptops in this case) and trying again. If that doesn't fix the problem, look at the cables and make sure they didn't get damaged (had this happen in an HP laptop with that POS little SATA cable they use).

Cheers
 
Unfortunately I only have a bunch of laptops.. I was able to format the drive assign letters etc through diskpart and it SHOWS UP as a drive if you "browse" to find the drivers to install it... but yet it doesn't show up for install...
 
Hrmmmm, can you try updating the BIOS then, and make sure the SATA ports are set to AHCI mode then? It shouldn't be a problem, but I've found laptops to be picky like that.

If you don't have a desktop to use, do you have a working laptop with eSATA? Or, perhaps try formatting it with a live cd (gparted comes to mind) and performing a secure erase. I would start by secure erasing it and see if that works, then if not, partition it with MBR/NTFS and don't assign any drive letters.
 
If you have a pretty new laptop, make sure the Windows 7 DVD that you made your USB stick from is SP1. Some of the older non-SP1 dvd's are missing some of the newer drivers. If you can't find a SP1 DVD, you can always slipstream in your drivers with nlite.
 
I'm about to take this thing and chuck it....

A good friend of mine suggested to try adding the intel rapid store drivers as I have a hm67 chipset.. still nothing. I did manage to get the SSD to show up as a CD drive through diskpart. I'm pretty much at a loss. I pulled it into a USB 3.0 adapter to hook up to one of my other laptops. It shows up in disk manager but nowhere else... the samsung magician software won't see it through the USB adapters controller apparently. I can't use a live gpart cd as I don't have a cd drive.
 
Upgrade the BIOS. Also, you can use UNetBootIn to "burn" gparted to a thumb drive and boot from that.
 
Do this.. run diskpart and then:

1. show disk
2. Select disk (whatever it was in show disk)
3. clean
4. create partition primary offset=4096 (offset=4096 is to align it properly. Despite what MS claims, the Win7 installation does not align it properly when formatting from setup. You can verify this by checking with diskpart after Windows has finished installing)
5. active
6. assign
7. format fs=ntfs quick

Going this route will also keep Windows from making the lame 100MB system partition.

Then it should show up in the Windows installer... if it is going to work at all.

You either want RAID or AHCI selected in BIOS. ATA will hurt perfomance.
 
This vaguely reminds me of the weirdness with installing windows from a flash drive and getting errors trying to manage a disk partition but everything works fine when booting off an optical disk, no messing with drivers either time.
 
@cyclone3d

Tried that still no luck.

I am starting to think it is what rsbennett00 is saying....

Anyone else??? I might have to go get a eSATA cable...
 
Are you running the port that the SSD is attached to in AHCI RAID mode?

I had the exact same problem that I couldn't get Win7 x64 to install from a USB flash drive until I disabled RAID mode and just ran it in "raw" AHCI mode. Win7 installed with no problems after that.
 
@DejaWiz

No options in my BIOS anywhere for anything about raid laptop doesn't have option for raid. I'll look again to be sure however it is a pretty limited bios. I've installed win7 with a standard HDD in this before no issues but I did use a CD because the drive worked at that time.
 
incomudro said:
@DejaWiz

No options in my BIOS anywhere for anything about raid laptop doesn't have option for raid. I'll look again to be sure however it is a pretty limited bios. I've installed win7 with a standard HDD in this before no issues but I did use a CD because the drive worked at that time.
Click to expand...

Well shoot, you may have to use the Win7 disc to install it, then. It's rare that this problem with a USB flash drive comes up for me, but it has in the past. Using the disc has always remedied the problem for me if I'm certain that RAID mode is disabled.
 
I am using a OEM SP1 of windows from the web.. not sure if this could be the reason but I figured it's worth mentioning. I just downloaded a copy from digitalriver I am going to try here soon. I might be able to jack the optical drive out of another computer in the house.
 
incomudro said:
@cyclone3d

Tried that still no luck.

I am starting to think it is what rsbennett00 is saying....

Anyone else??? I might have to go get a eSATA cable...
Click to expand...

Do you have an HDD that you can try to see if the Windows installer will see it? It will need to be SATA as well.

I am guessing that it won't see it either. Sounds like you will need the F6 drivers from Intel.. or you can slipstream them in.

eSATA cable is not going to help at all. eSata is just an external SATA port. If the Windows installer is not seeing the SATA controller, it is not going to help using the external port.
 
cyclone3d

I just tried it and to my surprise the installer can't see the HDD either. I'm going to assume its the USB drive. I'm burning a copy of win7 with another computer and am going to try taking the drive out of it they're both dells so it should be somewhat plug and play. We'll see what happens when I boot up with the optical.
 
If I may. I had a Seagate Momentus XT 500GB in a laptop that win7 home premium on USB that would not see the drive no matter what I did. Bios seen it. Mini-XP seen it and so forth.

The fix for me is while it was looking around for the drive was to physically swap the USB stick to another port. Doing this allowed it to see the drive. Dunno why but it worked for me and read somewhere it was a bug afterwards.
 
I am also inclined towards the solution RogueTrip posted. I once tried to install Windows 7 on a laptop but didn't realize the USB drive was placed in a USB 3 port. Unfortunately, it seems that when using USB 3 port to install anything will lead to errors or drives that are not recognized.

Locate your USB 2 ports and have another go at installing windows 7.
 
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