HHD replaced with SSD - No Boot Sector Found (Dell Inspirion 1545)

[Wayne Bulleid]

Hello - Could somebody please help?

I have a Dell 1545 Inspiron that now has 8GB RAM and a Crucial 120GB SSD (swapped out last night). The original HDD drive failure has prompted me to do this.

Problem: On boot, wiht the SSD onboard, message displayed, no boot sector on HDD

Went to BIOS, no option for SSD (just HDD). Change boot order to CD then HDD, fine... Pop in the new OEM Win 7 Pro 64 bit disc, looks to start loading and after 4 mins or so, the Inspiron reboots. It appears to be on a loop with no load occurring.

BIOS shows all RAM available, all components operable AHCI is default selection, it recognises the new 120GB drive (under a heading of HDD). I have seated and re-seated the SSD.

Back in the good old days, you used to have to format new drives and partition as appropriate. The latter still might be true, but what about SSD's?

I am the first to admit I am no expert (the last time I did a HDD upgrade was about 10 years ago to a desktop, but should it be this challenging? Have I missed a step?

 

[torbendalum]

If the drive is not initialized from factory you need to do it. Connect the drive to a running computer.
right click My computer -> manage -> Disk management. your drive should be on the list, click on disk and choose initialize.

If you have a old dos boot disk you can also do it with fdisk like in the old days.

 

[C12Friedman]

With an SSD, you need to ensure it is formatted as NTFS and not FAT32 - that may be something to check

 

[torbendalum]

You do not need to format the disk, that will be done automatically under windows install with NTFS.
but you need to initialize it before windows can see it.

 

[Wayne Bulleid]

If the drive is not initialized from factory you need to do it. Connect the drive to a running computer.
right click My computer -> manage -> Disk management. your drive should be on the list, click on disk and choose initialize.

If you have a old dos boot disk you can also do it with fdisk like in the old days.

HI torbendalum - no joy. Connected the crucial drive to desk top, computer management, storage, disk management - no sign of the drive. Crucial drive on the desktop is recognised in BIOS. Do you have any further ideas? PS - BIOS version is the latest on the laptop and no boot disk...

 

[Wayne Bulleid]

Also, and know idea of this helps, when looking in device manager, I can see the Crucial SSD and it says "This device is working properly."

 

[Wayne Bulleid]

right - I now have initialized the drive using my desktop computer...apparently a pop up should have appeared asking what action I wanted to perform. I clearly missed it. I now have an initialized sdd.

Now reseated in laptop - BIOS sequence checked, going from CD with Win 7 disc on board.

Initially the same error came up and after a restart of the laptop we have had a continuous loop of "Windows is loading files..." (this is now the 7th time)....seems to get to the end of the white line, comes up with "stating windows" with the four colours and once formed, the laptop goes into a reboot sequence and appears to start it all again....

somebody please tell me why and how I overcome this....