Dell M6500, mSATA and the FCM slot

Can the computer access the mSATA drive? In my previous post I concluded that it is unlikely that the drive and the socket are electronically incompatible even though physically compatible because the computer pre-dates the agreement of the mSATA standard.

If the computer won't boot to the BIOS with only the mSATA SSD in place then there's not much hope that it will be able to boot Windows off that SSD.

John

 

I think I am going to have to figure out how to do this.

 

It will boot with all the hard drive slot filled and that's the way I intend to run it.

I already have windows installed.

 

Can Windows see the 128GB mSATA SSD as an additional drive?

John

 

Windows sees all three drives.

When windows first boots only the mSATA is visible in explorer (because there are no partitions on the 2x256GBs).

But all three drives show up in Disk Management.

 

Here is a screenshot of disk management.

 

Thanks.

That trashes my incompatibility theory.

John

 

Yeah. I think I also trashed my theory about capacity being a barrier.

I am going to try to install windows onto the 1TB drive when both drive bays are filled
but first I want to move the boot partition over to the mSATA drive.

Anyone have any insight into how this is done?

 

Here's an explanation about how to make the drive bootable.

Once you have done that you can check in the BIOS whether it can see the mSATA SSD as a boot device. It's possible that the BIOS isn't set up to see that interface and it's something loaded by Windows that allows it to see the mSATA SSD. Something similar happened when USB 3.0 first came out and wasn't supported at the BIOS level and bootable USB devices had to be connected to a USB 2.0 port.

John

 

The bios definitely allows the mSATA to be booted.

The way set up now the only two bootable devices are the optical drive and the "minicard ssd device" (mSATA in the FCM slot).

Every other possible bootable device is disabled (including both hard drives, esata, devices etc).

When I select the mSATA as the drive I want install Windows to Windows says something to the effect "Windows may have to create additional partitions.....". So windows is forcing the creation of the 100MB partition on that other drive even though the hardware has no problem booting from the mSATA.