success at last! boot windows from mSATA SSD

My system is the short-lived Vostro 3360 which has turned out to be a highly capable machine which came at a very good price and an excellent form factor. It shipped with a 500GB HDD but I knew that this generation of notebooks came with an mSATA port so now that prices have come down, I picked up a 240GB SSD so I could run windows and apps from it, using the original HDD for storage. I'm not an advanced user by any means, but a number of blogs informed me that setting this up should be no problem. But it ended up being much more of a hassle than these blogs implied. 

The problem seems to stem from the fact that Dell is resistant to the idea of using an mSATA SSD to boot Windows from. When it ships systems with both an SSD and an HDD, the SSD is quite small and is designed to be a glorified cache using Intel's Rapid Storage Technology. Why Dell would limit its users to this second-best solution for rapid booting and launching apps is a mystery, but at least it seemed like there should be a way to accomplish what I wanted. After running into dead ends using the methods from these generic blog posts, I started reading forums specific to Dell systems and learned about Dell's reservations about setting up its computers this way. I finally found a few posts with people who had managed to do it, but they suggested that the only way you could force the system to use the mSATA to boot Windows was to PHYSICALLY REMOVE THE HDD and install Windows while only the SSD was physically installed! I wasn't quite prepared to do this since removing the HDD is a tedious process on this slim machine, so I kept looking and FINALLY found this post in which a Dell support person reluctantly describes how to install Windows on the mSATA, with the warning that this is for advanced users only: http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/desktop/f/3514/t/19516805.aspx 

The process is quite simple, although it means that you can't simply clone your original HDD onto the SSD and then change the boot priority. Both drives have to be completely wiped and a fresh Windows install has to occur onto the SSD. This process was very smooth and I thought I was well on my way. However, once Windows was re-installed and booting from the SSD, there were multiple hardware issues with the system, all related to missing drivers. Luckily, I still had my Resource Media DVD and could restore the drivers from that, but this was quite confusing, since many of the drivers that needed to be installed were for devices that the utility program had already placed a checkmark beside, as though they had been successfully installed. I ended up re-installing drivers for every aspect of the system's hardware, whether the utility displayed the checkmark or not. Eventually, all the hardware functionality was restored (except multi-touch, which was pretty terrible on this machine anyway), and the system is booting and launching programs at vastly improved speeds. 

I wrote this because I only found a solution after much frustration and failure, which I only overcame because others took the time to share their experiences. So hopefully this will be helpful to anyone working with this generation of notebooks and wanting to run their OS from an mSATA SSD. Feel free to comment if you need further details.