mSATA SSD and HDD problems

[l-_-ll-_-l]

Hi everyone,

 

My brother was complaining about how slow his HP laptop was despite it not being that old. I checked it and saw he was still on an HDD and had an empty mSATA port. I ordered the Samsung EVO 860 250GB mSATA SSD and mounted it in a jiffy. When I turned the computer on again it seemed to be stuck in some kind of loop, eventually leading me to the blue screen where you have your advanced booting/troubleshooting options. I took out the HDD, changed the booting order, installed Windows 10 on the mSATA drive and everything seemed to be working great. After that I installed the HDD again, as he wished to use it as a data drive for pictures, but the looping started again. I took the HDD out again, booted from the mSATA drive, connected the HDD through a SATA to USB cable and backed it up on another drive I had laying around. I then wiped his HDD and installed it again, hoping that an empty drive would prompt the laptop to search for the mSATA drive to boot from. Unfortunately the laptop couldn't find any bootable device although minutes before that, when the HDD wasn't connected, it booted into the mSATA SSD without any problem. I found a lot of similar complaints online, but never a fairly easy solution, why isn't the mSATA and regular SATA port differentiated between in the booting order? (For those wondering, I did turn off the Intel Rapid thingy in the BIOS that would use the mSATA slot for caching.)

 

Any thoughts?

[userzero]

Too confusing.

 

The problem was simply you connected the original hard drive again which contained boot sectors etc of the old OS. All that needed doing was plugging it into another comp, or in a caddy, and removing the appropriate partitions/files.

[seagate_surfer]

Hello l-_-ll-_-l,

 

Doing a secure erase on the HDD sounds like the way to go but yo also need to fix your boot order sequence, I didn't see on what you wrote that you went back to the BIOS to specify that the first boot drive will be the SSD, I recommend you not to set up more bootable devices from just leave the SSD as primary boot drive and that's it. 

 

in regards to "(For those wondering, I did turn off the Intel Rapid thingy in the BIOS that would use the mSATA slot for caching.)", that's not applicable in your case because that's for when you want to accelerate HDD using one SSD as cache for better performance or to save a portion of your SSD (20-60GB) for cache only to help access files faster but for what you are posting this doesn't seem to be what you are looking for.

[l-_-ll-_-l]

2 hours ago, userzero said:

Too confusing.

 

The problem was simply you connected the original hard drive again which contained boot sectors etc of the old OS. All that needed doing was plugging it into another comp, or in a caddy, and removing the appropriate partitions/files.

In the end I did that. But even now with a formatted HDD the HP wants to boot into the HDD through SATA instead of the SSD through mSATA, that is the real problem.

 

(I just gave all the other info to avoid suggestions I may have already tried.)

[l-_-ll-_-l]

4 minutes ago, seagate_surfer said:

Hello l-_-ll-_-l,

 

Doing a secure erase on the HDD sounds like the way to go but yo also need to fix your boot order sequence, I didn't see on what you wrote that you went back to the BIOS to specify that the first boot drive will be the SSD, I recommend you not to set up more bootable devices from just leave the SSD as primary boot drive and that's it. 

 

in regards to "(For those wondering, I did turn off the Intel Rapid thingy in the BIOS that would use the mSATA slot for caching.)", that's not applicable in your case because that's for when you want to accelerate HDD using one SSD as cache for better performance or to save a portion of your SSD (20-60GB) for cache only to help access files faster but for what you are posting this doesn't seem to be what you are looking for.

Indeed, that's why I turned it off.

 

I formatted the HDD and there's nothing on it anymore. When I plug it in  the HP wants to boot into the HDD through SATA instead of the SSD through mSATA. In the bios it doesn't differentiate between mSATA or SATA in the boot order. 

[seagate_surfer]

Can you grab the model number please? You can save a dxdiag file if the model is not handy. Go to Start > Run and type 'dxdiag' (without quotes please) in the 'Open' field and press OK button and wait for 'green' progress bar to finish loading and then press the 'Save All Information...'’ button. Share it through here maybe I can find more to help you set up the boot sequence properly.

 

[l-_-ll-_-l]

2 hours ago, seagate_surfer said:

Can you grab the model number please? You can save a dxdiag file if the model is not handy. Go to Start > Run and type 'dxdiag' (without quotes please) in the 'Open' field and press OK button and wait for 'green' progress bar to finish loading and then press the 'Save All Information...'’ button. Share it through here maybe I can find more to help you set up the boot sequence properly.

 

From what I know it's an HP Envy 15-j191nb. I will attach the files you asked for. Thanks for your help!

DxDiag.txt

[seagate_surfer]

So, there is one BIOS firmware update available that you may want to try, look under BIOS (1) and download the file and then see the instructions to do BIOS updates: 

• Updating the BIOS: https://support.hp.com/ca-en/product/hp-envy-15-j100-notebook-pc-series/5401187/model/7467680/document/c00042629

Before you go into the update I found the following from HP:

 

 

So, in theory under "Boot menu" you should be able to set the order for the bottom process as per the HP BIOS guideline, so just go ahead and enable the SSD as primary and don't select anything else for secondary boot drive or etc... 

 

Then I don't think the BIOS in your computer is UEFI for the year of the laptop, but if you find under "Main menu" or "Advanced" anything that says "Legacy" go ahead and enable it the legacy mode, this is to work with devices manufacturer prior to UEFI was created, if it doesn't work then just switch back from Legacy to UEFI mode. And one more thing, there is also under "Main menu" or "Advanced" one option that allows you to enable/disable the hard drives, and here I am not talking about the boot sequence order, again I am talking about just enabling or disabling a hard drive from the BIOS, meaning that the device will or will not appear in the operating system one the interface loads depending if the device was enabled or not from the BIO, this is not the boot order! The option to enable and disable hard drives looks similar to this.

 

 

The BIOS Setup Information and Menu Options is here: https://support.hp.com/ca-en/document/c00034791#AbT0