M6400 + Intel X25-M

My Intel SSD X25-M will be arriving in a few days. Lets hope it has the latest firmware..

But is there anything i need to know before i put the SSD in the laptop and proceed with the installation. I understand there are a couple of things I need to do in BIOS and one of them is to change the SATA setting to AHCI???? ATA?? instead of RAID. And then after installation i change it back to which one???

I would do a search on the forums, but its the crappy search tool which makes its hard for me to do a specific search.

For those of you who had done this particular setup, can you PLEASE write up a quick guide. Ive done many formatting before but first time with an SSD.

This will be for a 32bit XP Pro SP3 if that matters..

 

If you will use XP, you have to build a special new Windows Installation CD with integrated SATA Drivers - because XP is not equipped with these (Special Controller Driver from"Intel Matrix Storage Managers").

You can do this f.e. via nLite-Software (free) and your existing Windows XP-CD.
Tutorials to do this proper you will find al lot via google - i only have a german tutorial. But it is very easy.

 

You can also install XP in ATA mode and install the AHCI drivers post-install. I don't think there's a guide specifically for the E6400 for either of these methods, but it should be the same for any machine with the same (and most likely even older) chipsets.

 

Thank you for the reply. Will look into it.

Hey Wolf, when you said E6400, did you mean M6400 because that's what i have. But im sure the procedures are pretty much the same like you said - chipset wise.

So what you are saying is before i actually install the hardware(ssd drive), with the original HD still intact and active, i have to go into BIOS, click ATA mode??? Restart, put XP CD then shut down.. and then proceed with swapping the HD, and proceed with installation?

 

I'm using OCZ Vertex 120GB with my M6400
what I did is
placed the SSD HDD in the primary socket
I changed the sata mode to ATA as requested for any SSD then installed my OS
and now I'm Rocking with the extreme speed boost