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Make old drive Data drive
) Tesla 1856
I
see you a lot on the forum giving excellent advise which always seems to be
right on. Will give you the situation first then ask you a question. I have a
Aurora R4 and had a Kingston 240 gig SSD drive installed. beings I wanted
the hard drive cloned to the SSD and with the UEFI type BIOS on the Aurora I
would have had to buy a different software that came with the SSD. Turns out
with the gift cards I had from Staples it was easier to let their tech do it as
he said he had fought the UEFI before and knew how it was done. He cloned the
hard drive to the SSD and it is working great. Now comes the problem and
question. When he cloned the drive it shows the SSD as being the C drive, which
is fine. When I ask him about what letter was assigned to the old hard drive as
I could use that as a storage drive if needed he said in the A07 BIOS there is
no way to do that and he just unplugged power to the old hard drive so it
wouldn't try to boot to it.The tech at Staples is certified A++ this and A++
that and knows what he is doing, but that just doesn't seem right. I
have 83 gig not used on the SSD so more than likley never go over that, but is
what he is telling me a fact or is he mistaken? Also the drive light is
flickering very fast just like the old hard drive is still working only all the time, so much so
I put a peace of black tape over it because it is very distracting. If I unplug
the SATA cable going to the old hard drive will that bother anything and get
rid of that light blinking?.
Thank
you
lynne4270
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April 28th, 2013 16:00
Turns out my neighbors nephew is a computer tech that works for a local goverment agancy here. I ask him about my situation and he and one of the guys that works for him came over today to look at my computer. It took them a couple hours, but they got the computer working with the C drive being the SSD for the OS and things I wanted quick access to and G drive, which is the 1T hard drive for storage. It also took care of that flashing hard drive light and it's back to normal now. Either of them had a clue what that was all about. They were talking way above my head and the only thing I got out of it was something about "Secure Boot" They both said they had worked with UEFI before and the Alienware/Dell is different?. Tesla1856. I looked into those links you posted and had already had done them. One of the guys that worked on the computer got into the registry and did??? and said it would help the life of the SSD.
Thanks again.
Wayne
lynne4270
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April 27th, 2013 14:00
I guess I must have not explained right. First the tech said that the A07 Bios can't even see the old 1T or second hard drive even when the drive is hooked up, It's not a 3T? so there is no way of using it for a storage drive!!, Second as far as the blinking HDD light it blinks constantly at about 70 times a minute even if the nothing is being done on the computer and it has been idle for 20 minutes, it never veries. I never had any problem with just a regular hard drive blinking because it told me something was being done in the computer. This is totally different.
Tesla1856
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April 27th, 2013 14:00
Well first, no ... he was incorrect. Of course you can have Drives 2-4, even if Drive-1 is a SSD.
Now, do you want to:
1. Connect the 3tb spinning drive and use it for backups or large data files?
2. Disconnect it?
I've never heard of anyone not wanting to see the HDD access light flash. It's the easiest way to see if the system is reading/wriiting to the drives. Knowing that it's accessing heavily might influence your next action on the system. It also helps trouble-shooting. Anyway, the light flashes when accessing the SSD also.
Tesla1856
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April 27th, 2013 15:00
At some point, answer my question above.
1. It should work unless the drive mysteriously went bad at Staples. To the system, HDD and SSD are detected the same. For his statement to be true, it would mean you can only have 1 drive in a system (which is obviously not correct). When a tech can't get something working, it's common for them to blame it on the machine, motherboard, BIOS, or whatever. It might be, but usually it's something else. You never really know until it's fixed.
2. Drive access (and therefore light flashing) could be because of any number of background Processes (not just user file access). It could be Defrag, SuperFetch, Indexing, etc. By the way ... most of those should be turned off because they aren't needed on a SSD, and will just wear-it-out faster.
http://www.computing.net/howtos/show/solid-state-drive-ssd-tweaks-for-windows-7/552.html
http://lifehacker.com/5802838/how-to-maximize-the-life-of-your-ssd
http://www.dell.com/support/troubleshooting/us/en/19/KCS/KcsArticles/ArticleView?c=us&l=&s=dhs&docid=579416
lynne4270
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April 27th, 2013 16:00
Thanks for those links and information. I think I already did all those things, but I will check again. I know that Defrag, super fetch and indexing is turned off and trim is on. I went into msconfig and don't see anything running in the background that shouldn't be. I turned off Norton to see if that was causing a problem, but no change. I talked to the tech that did the work and told him my concerns. He said bring it back in and he will disconnect the SSD, hook up the hard drive and see if he can boot from that as the drive was cloned and everything should still be on it.. If he can then he will dig into it deeper to see what is going on with it. He said this was the first Alienware computer that uses UEFI that he has worked on, so there could be something he overlooked. He is looking into the documentataion to see what he can find. Will post back on what he finds.
Thanks again.
Tesla1856
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April 28th, 2013 19:00
I knew it was possible. It's not that hard, but I'm glad to hear you found the help you needed to make it happen.
There are different versions and implementations. These Aurora R4 will also handle Windows 8 (with Secure Boot). With Windows7-64bit, you can usually just drop it down to Legacy (BIOS emulation) mode if you want.
Enjoy your new SSD.
lynne4270
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April 28th, 2013 20:00
Thanks for your help. I really like the SSD, it is so much faster and will never go back to a regular HD except for storage.