Latitude E5540 PCIe SSD upgrade

Your system can only have a 2.5" HDD/SSHD/SSD. The E5540 does not have an M.2 slot for a PCIe SSD. That according to the Dell specs at the E5540 support page and at Crucial.

and this slot can t be used for a memory?

thank you so much for the information.

the laptop is obsolete already, because it can t update to windows 11, so I`m not that affected by the fact that mSATA is old tech. the thing with not being able to be used as a boot drive is very helpful. thank you all.

@ejn63​ Thanks for the input but are you absolutely sure that an mSATA SSD in this WWAN slot cannot be used as a boot drive? I ask because I cannot achieve to boot Windows 7 Pro from this drive in a GPT layout while I can configure it as a boot drive from the UEFI BIOS.

I don't believe the BIOS setup options would mislead me in believing wrongly that it can boot an SSD from this WWAN slot. Because I can boot from it but the osloader registered in BCD fails to load Windows 7 and the same for the WinRE environment. I can tweak the BCD entries as I want, the changes are properly applied but the Windows 7 bootloader winload.efi fails to load the system.

At this boot stage of OS loading is the UEFI BIOS still involved? Could it be responsible for making the OS loading fail?

@Peter_Pan_7​

Hi,

I do know this was asked three years ago for a ten year-old machine but the question remains relevant IMHO. While this model is not straighly compliant with Windows 11 due to its TPM chip in version 1.2 instead of 2.0 and Windows 10 will become unsupported by Microsoft as of October, 2025.

Anyway, this Dell Latitude E5540 model does boot from a mSATA SSD and you can manage dual boot from a software boot manage like Windows Manager or LInux GRUB or by hardware selection with F12 key at (re)boot if you prefer like me to get two independant systems with the 2.5" SATA and the mSATA disks.

I struggled a little bit to get this working and asked in this community before being successful. You will see a lot of savvy people here saying that booting from an mSATA SSD does not work but this statement is actually wrong provided you do not have the combination of a discrete graphics card and an ExpressCard slot.

But I just struggled just because I wanted to manage a big change directly from my running cloning source Windows disk with a MBR>GPT conversion on the fly. I used MiniTool Partition Wizard for this complex operation and failed to load a cloned copy of Windows 7 Pro from the SATA MBR disk to the mSATA GPT disk. I could boot from the mSATA disk from Windows Manager or the F12 option, i.e. the BCD bootmgr  entry was OK but Windows failed to boot, i.e the Windows osloader entry (winload.efi) entry looked to be well configured but didn't work. I checked that the FAT32 system and the NTFS boot partitions were OK and did not find any root cause for Windows not starting from the mSATA GPT installation.

As I my factory SATA HDD was configured in RAID mode for SATA operation, I wondered if this RAID mode was a showstopper. So I successfully changed it to AHCI but to no avail for having my mSATA clone SSD load Windows on boot. But I kept this AHCI mode configuration in the UEFI configuration as many people report I/O performance is better in this mode than in RAID mode.

So I decided to do it again keeping the MBR>GPT conversion on the fly of the cloning operation but from a recovery console of MiniTool Partition Wizard to have no files locked or inaccessible on the SATA source disk... and it worked! I decided to keep the two disks independant, i.e. without any boot manager on any disk for a dual boot option. I prefer to select which disk to boot at startup with the F12 key. As my purpose was to update from W7 Pro to W10 Pro on the mSATA SSD and to keep a working W7 Pro install on the SATA HDD, i did change the device boot order in the BIOS>UEFI configuration. Just because the mSATA install was running far faster due to the SSD.

After that, I just run a MCT process to upgrade from W7 Pro to W10 Pro and got all my environment working in W10 like a charm. I plan to upgrade it to Windows 11 later when Windows 10 will end in late october, 2025. While Windows 11 is not supported on the E5540 model as explained above, I will manage the upgrade with a simple registry trick. Due to secure boot, I will not be able to run a dual boot systeme with the W7 Pro MBR SATA HDD but at that moment, I won't need it anymore for any purpose. I could install a Linux distro or any other Windows system on a new GPT SATA SDD or just get extra storage for data storage or data backup.

One thing I did not achieve is to have the mSATA SSD Windows 7 Pro system load in RAID operation mode but I do not see a reason why this would fail. The SSD did boot in RAID mode but Windows did not load for an unknown reason while the BCD configuration was correct. Maybe some corrupted files but CHKDSK+DISM+SFC diagnostics didn't help to resolve this. Then I switched from RAID to AHCI mode and was successful. I read in the community that a poster achieved to have a mirror RAID 0 configuration in the E6540 model with the mSATA SSD as the RAID master drive. The same should work with an E5540 model/

In summary: while it is a 10 years Dell Latitude model, it works very fine from a Windows 10 install on a mSATA SSD and you can manage dual boot with the SSD disk if you want.

Hope it helps.