Precision 7560 & 7760 Owners' Thread

Sorry to ask again but does anyone have a suggestion for this?

Many thanks

 

Can you check to see what partition structure your external hard drive has?
From Windows, open up "Disk Management". Find your external drive in the list at the bottom. Right-click the area on the left where it says "Disk X" and see if it says "Convert to MBR disk" or "Convert to GPT disk". (The option will be greyed out either way. Disk Management will only allow conversion if there are no partitions on the disk.)

If it says "Convert to MBR disk" then you have the GPT partition structure.

If it says "Convert to GPT disk" then you have the MBR partition structure. With everything going UEFI now, I wonder if the BIOS is trying to read something and expecting a GPT disk and getting hung up. You can convert it in place by running this command from the command prompt (run as admin):
mbr2gpt /convert disk:X
Where "X" is your disk number (as shown in Disk Management).

 

I saw this in the manual and that's why I thought that it might work.
I don't want to run the system with RAID mode on so at this point it doesn't matter to me whether or not it would work with RAID mode on. (Though I think that the manual is probably wrong, again something basically copy/pasted from another system). I'll leave the 2TB drive as the system drive in my Precision 7530 as it is repurposed.

Having some trouble getting my existing Windows install booting on the Precision 7560, so I'm still running from the 7530 today. Definitely not as seamless as my previous Windows "transplants". I'll post some details once I get it worked out.

 

Thank you very much.

It has Convert to GPT Disk as an option (greyed out as you say).

I have run it, but not sure if it's the right result (attached)?

 

Ah, my bad. "disk" needs a slash in front of it.
mbr2gpt /convert /disk:4

[Edit] I see you figured that out. Give me a sec.

 

Thank you!

I was thinking it was something to do with the boot settings on this PC rather than anything to do with the drive, as I don't remember this issue with my 7740 - but you know better than me!

 

Ok, so I had not realized that this tool is for OS drives only. (Um, why?)
The simplest (but not fastest) thing to do would be to relocate your data, delete the disk partition, use Disk Management to convert to GPT, make a new partition, and copy the data back. (Phew)
The other thing that I've used before is "gdisk" from Linux which can do an in-place conversion. https://www.rodsbooks.com/gdisk/
There's probably other tools for Windows that can convert in-place but I'm not familiar with any.

That said. Not sure if this is even the problem... Just my suspicion. I've booted the 7560 with an external drive attached this morning (but it was a GPT-formatted drive).

 

Thanks a lot. Your idea that the problem might be with the drive rather than the laptop prompted me to try with another drive. That one was also seemingly MBR formatted (Convert to GPT was also shown greyed out in Disk Management). It booted fine with that drive plugged in.

So maybe the issue is only with that particular drive. If that's the case, and there's nothing I should be changing in my BIOS settings, I'll just live with it (and maybe one day do what you suggested and convert it).

Really appreciate the help. Thank you for taking the time.

 

Heh, nice analogy. Although I'm sure there are people of higher temperature than her...

A LOT more expensive.

On the bright side, my requested specs have been approved. Should be getting the new laptop in August.

 

Congratulations on getting your requested specs!

I have a few HP laptops around. I have an old EliteBook 8770W which is still as indestructible as the day I bought it, and we have an HP 14 G2 around here too. The toolless maintainability of the latest generation looks really neat. But, for the exact same contents, you're paying at least a 50% premium over Dell Precision, and the quality of the tech support is an unknown quantity to me. It's interesting that they are shipping some (apparently) sophisticated remote access software to these workstations as an interesting value-add to distinguish these systems from the competition. But, buying a maxed out workstation is going from "decent used car" territory to "brand new car" territory - it's hard enough to justify $4K or even $5K, but $7-8K for a single laptop? Not easy.

Whereas, $5K for a Precision is going to buy you a system that will be both highly performant and well supported by Dell and the community for the next 4-5 years, easily. And, nobody else is shipping 11th gen max-spec workstations right now, so there's that too.

Now, if the https://frame.work/ people started to make max-spec workstations down the line...