New M6500 Discussion Thread

As weird as it sounds, you need to enable RAID mode to bootup from the mSATA. The weird part is if you have too many drives in the bootup order, the mSATA option just disappears.

*Edit* You need to have your MBR on your mSATA. If you have your MBR on another drive, once u take that drive out your system will fail to boot.

 

So, SilentCal, how can it boot from the msata if there is no boot partition? If the original boot disk is needed, when the machine boots isn't that the active OS disk and thus can not be touched, erased, to be used for data?

I don't really know, that's a good question, I am curious about that too. My 2.5" drive has an invisible 100MB partition that is listed as System, Active. It is a 750Gb drive and I can use that for whatever I want.

The Msata drive has one partition and it is listed as Boot, PageFile, CrashDrump. So, perhaps, if I would have spent another day on it, I could have gotten it to do what I want. I remember multiple os install, then the boot option for the MSATA would go away. I remember trying different options with Raid and AHCI. I think I screwed up and had it installed with the ATA mode (the slowest drive mode) and that was working. Finally I got tired of messing around (I gave up), put in a large drive I hopefully won't have to replace, and went with the flow.

 

That, I think, is the weird part of the issue. If Windows recognizes the msata, formats it, and installs to it, why isn't it creating a boot partition containing the MBR? I think what I'll do next is put the original boot drive back in, let it boot up, and then look in the disk manager and see if what partitions are listed.

 

So, here's how I wound up. I switched to Win 7 just to be sure that it wasn't something new in Win 10 causing the issues and put an old spare drive (OCZ Agility 120 GB) in the primary drive bay. In doing so, the msata minicard drive entry which disappears when the primary drive bay is empty returned including allowing it to be arranged in the boot order menu. After a successful installation, checking the drives in drive manager shows that, indeed, the 500 MB system reserved partition normally located on the boot drive is instead on the spare, bare drive installed in the primary drive bay. The msata drive which is the true boot drive has instead one big partition which shows Boot, PageFile, CrashDrump as SilentCal had experienced.

All and in all, thus far the computer runs fine, the Samsung SM841 is performing well, since I can't figure out a way to get it run without a drive in the primary bay, I think I'll follow SilentCal's lead and call it a day.

 

Have you tried just installing to a drive in the primary bay, and them cloning it over to the mSATA? That's pretty much what I did with mine, although I haven't tried removing my storage drive to run with only the mSATA.

 

Ok let me start from the top. The following is for installing Windows into a single mSATA and having it as the main bootup device.

• Remove all your drives and install with the mSATA alone.
• Enable RAID in the BIOS (It does not work if your SATA mode is set to anything other than RAID)
  
• Set the mSATA as the bootable drive
• Install Win7/8.1/10 etc
• Once installation is done, you should see it boot up fine into Windows
• Install any other drive you need back in and make sure they are not selected as bootable in BIOS
  
• Take care if you install too many drives into the M6500, the mSATA as a boot up option may disappear; not sure why though

Alternatively, if you wish to start out with more than one drive (not a good idea with the M6500)

• You can install the additional drives, but need to make sure they are formatted and not left as raw empty drives
• If left as raw empty drives, you will discover the boot manager in a drive other than the mSATA
• Follow the steps in the single mSATA setup

I did not discover this method to get the mSATA as a bootup device. It was discovered by a member previously in the thread and I just basically tried and tested it.

 

If you could, take a look in your disk manager and see if your storage drive has a system reserve partition instead of the msata. If it doesn't and the msata has separate system reserve partition, I'll give that a try.

 

DZ, were you able to switch back to AHCI afterward? Or was the performance good enough that it didn't matter?

 

AFAIK, RAID uses the AHCI standard as a base and expands on it to support RAID modes so there shouldn't be any performance difference between them for a single drive.

 

If you switch back to AHCI, you lose the ability to use the mSATA as a bootup drive. There's no performance difference between the RAID and AHCI option.