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    Dell Boot issue....need help asap

    Discussion in 'Dell' started by majorchamp, Mar 26, 2013.

  1. majorchamp

    majorchamp Notebook Guru

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    Here is the background.

    Bought an Inspiron 15R SE. It had the 750gb HDD with Windows 8 pre-installed. I ended up wiping the partitions for the installation so I could install Windows 7 on it. Well, fast fowarded and I got a 256gb mSata SSD. I didn't have the mSata port, so I installed it into a SATA -> mSata 2.5" caddy and placed it in the main HD location. I was able to install Windows 7 Ultimate on it no problems. I had left, on the old 750gb HD, the 500MB EFI System Partition and the 40MB OEM Partition.

    All has been great and fun. However, I started noticing a click noise coming from my 750GB drive (which I had turned into a storage drive BTW).

    I contacted Dell and they sent me out a new 750GB drive. I changed out the old one with the new one thinking I could reboot and format it appropriately. Turns out...the old one has the 500MB system partition, so without it my computer wouldn't boot up. It would show me some RealTech ethernet thing to get the mac address, and say no boot device found.

    In the BIOS, there was nowhere to tell it to boot from the SSD I have. The mSata SSD is not detected, I think because the port can't be found.

    So I am at a loss as to my next steps. Do I make a duplicate of the 500mb partition and copy it into a 500mb partition on my SSD?
     
    majorchamp, Mar 26, 2013
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  2. StormJumper

    StormJumper Notebook Virtuoso

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    So what did you do? You took out the 750 drive and replaced it with the 256 right? Did the 256 not fit the caddy that held the 750? Wasn't the SSD to match the size of the HDD that is what I thought when it was made so it would fit into the same drive specs without any mods to make it fit? Do you have a picture of the setup? Also you sure your Bios or EFI is updated to work with SSD? Also you should had asked them to send the recovery cd/dvd for your computer matching your serial number so you can reboot your drive back up-it will cost you some money to do so but that would've been a smart thing to do besides getting a new replacement drive. Contact Dell and ask them for the recovery cd/dvd if you don't have them and order them and use that to reboot your computer if they still will sell it. So how many drives are in it? From what I can find it has only one hard drive space inside the laptop.
     
    StormJumper, Mar 30, 2013
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