Problems booting Lenovo y480 when mSATA SSD is in.

[axax11]

I have had my y480 for over a year now and just bought a Plextor 128gb mSATA SSD to use mainly as a boot drive. I made a system image of my hard drive to an external hard drive and tried to clone my hdd to my sdd using AOMEI Backerupper. This seemed to work fine both my hdd and ssd appeared in disk management. I shut down and tried to reboot my computer, but it wouldn't boot. After turning legacy support on in the BIOS, changing the boot priority, and going from the boot menu, I was unable to boot at all when my SSD was it. So, I took it out and restored my internal hard drive. However, I now have a SSD with what I assume is a working clone of my HDD, and a factory reset hdd. On top of this, I am having difficulties booting from my external HDD to recover the system image even the the SDD is not installed. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks

 

[jaguarskx]

The solution is easy....

Remove the mSATA SSD. Smash it with a hammer and throw away what remains. Then re-install your hard drive.

 

[jaguarskx]

To really answer your question about booting from the mSATA SSD...

Laptops are not setup to boot from the mSATA drive. There are typically no options in the BIOS to do so. mSATA is not a "legacy" device so simply checking that off will not do anything.

I actually posted a solution in the Storage sub-forum in a thread called Useful SSD Articles - Part 2:

http/www.tomshardware.com/forum/270102-32-useful-articles-part


Scroll down towards the bottom of the 1st page in that thread. I posted a link to an article called Triple Your Speed: How to Install an mSATA SSD Boot Drive in Your Laptop.

That will solve your issue regarding booting up from the mSATA SSD.

 

[axax11]

To really answer your question about booting from the mSATA SSD...

Laptops are not setup to boot from the mSATA drive. There are typically no options in the BIOS to do so. mSATA is not a "legacy" device so simply checking that off will not do anything.

I actually posted a solution in the Storage sub-forum in a thread called Useful SSD Articles - Part 2:

http/www.tomshardware.com/forum/270102-32-useful-articles-part


Scroll down towards the bottom of the 1st page in that thread. I posted a link to an article called Triple Your Speed: How to Install an mSATA SSD Boot Drive in Your Laptop.

That will solve your issue regarding booting up from the mSATA SSD.

Thanks! I think this will help. However, I am unable to boot my laptop from any source when the SSD is in. It worked until I tried to clone the HDD over, but no longer does. Any solutions?

 

[jaguarskx]

So the OS cloned to the mSATA SSD. With just the mSATA SSD installed, does the laptop boot up? With the hard drive installed, but with the mSATA removed the laptop will boot up?

 

[axax11]

So the OS cloned to the mSATA SSD. With just the mSATA SSD installed, does the laptop boot up? With the hard drive installed, but with the mSATA removed the laptop will boot up?

The OS is cloned, but I believe I did it wrong. Next time I will use the method in your article. When I pulled out the hard drive, my computer failed to boot from the solid state drive. It is recognized in the BIOS and boot menu, but the lenovo boot screen continuosly flashed with no error message. I will try to wipe my SSD and start over. One more question, do you know why I am unable to boot from my external hard drive in order to recover the system image? I'm having trouble trying to recover all my data. Thanks for all your help.

 

[jaguarskx]

You will not be able to boot from an external drive if the laptop's BIOS does not offer that as an option.