Hello,
I just received a new M4600 from dell, with no pre-installed OS, and 2 drives:
-drive 0: HDD, 500 GB
-drive 1: SSD mini-card (on mini-pcie-e port), 128 GB
the SSD is set as first boot drive in the BIOS.
I tried installing windows 7 on the SSD. It already had 2 partitions:
-partition 1: 39 MB, 38MB free, "reserved (OEM)"
-partition 2: 2GB, "OS", system partition
the rest of unallocated space.
Before installing anything, when booting the laptop, it said "no OS installed" and that was all.
So first I tried installing the win 7 on the unallocated space. It installed well, but on reboot it couldn't start, the "no os installed" was still there.
I tried fixMBR, fixboot, the automatic win7 DVD boot repair tool, nothing worked or detected any problem.
So I tried to erase the first install (format it), to extend the existing (factory installed) 2GB system partition. Windows wouldn't do it. And all I knew was that it was not NTFS.
It is only when I resorted to formatting this 2GB system partition to NTFS, and merging it with the unallocated space behind it, that when I installed win7 again, I then got on reboot "Bootmgr missing, pres ctrl+alt+del to reboot". And again, nothing could change that, no fixmbr, nothing that I could find in diskpart. Seemed like this SSD would only understand something said in a typically "special-SSDish" language: on that "OS" 2GB partition, there was SSDish language, on a usual windows partition there is not, no matter how I did it. And the disappearing of the 2GB partition was the only thing the ssd could react to...
There are 2 aggraving circumstances: I am trying to install win7 on a SSD, and not only a ssd, but a mini-card SSD, which I know requires special factory settings in order to be recognized as a bootable drive, because it is mounted on a mini-pci-e port, not made to be booted on. These settings were to be factory-made by Dell. And I may have erased some of these settings by formatting the "OS" partition that I could not extend.
Second bad point: my laptop came with an obscure "beware of 512e hard drives" message (without dell beeing able to tell me wether I did have a 512e drive or not, just "your computer may have a 512e hard drive"), with something about a lot of compatibility issues, the need to install special intel drivers (but how can I install them if I have absolutely no OS installed!) and special windows updates. And in France it is 3 in the morning, and even tomorrow I do not know who I may call in Dell to fix this horribly complicated problem. I just can't understand what's going on with the boot sequence on these weird mini-card ssd drives, and without knowing it, why can't my win7 simply boot!
Any help?
Thanks a lot!
