[rhymin]

Hi, I am upgrading my hard drive to a Sansdisk Solid State Hard Drive 120 GB. I also have a 7200 RPM Western Digital (WD) 500 GB Hard Drive that I am currently using. I would like to install the operating system on the SSD though and use the WD 500GB for other programs. I have never used 2 Hard drives before. Last week, I just took out my WD and put those sata cables in the SSD. I didn't reformat or anything. I got an error that said BOOTMGR is missing. I am wondering the correct way to go about this so I don't get this error again, as it was difficult to overcome. I knew all I had to do was put in the Windows 7 disc and repair windows, but every time I tried that, the screen went blank and I had to restart. I finally left the PC off overnight and tried again the next morning. It worked and repaired fine. I really do not want to run into this problem again. What is the correct way to go about this without getting that BOOTMGR error? Do I need to reformat my WD hard drive first and plug both of them into SATA at the same time? I am using Windows 7 64 bit.

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put the SSD in the case connected to the sata 3 or sata2 controller...
leave the hard drive out of the case for now...
put your OS cd/dvd in the optical drive and boot up to the cd drive ...load windows on the SSD drive...if your usind windows 7 it will/should install the ACHI drivers automatically...
if you not installing windows 7 then you need to go into the bios and set the drive to AHCI or you won't get the speed bump from using a SSD...
after youv'e got windows installed the connect the hard drive back up and go to administrative tools device management...storage and format the hard drive in preparation for using it to contain all your data...
only install your OS and programs to the SSD ...move the my documents to the hard drive

[happyrock]

put the SSD in the case connected to the sata 3 or sata2 controller...
leave the hard drive out of the case for now...
put your OS cd/dvd in the optical drive and boot up to the cd drive ...load windows on the SSD drive...if your usind windows 7 it will/should install the ACHI drivers automatically...
if you not installing windows 7 then you need to go into the bios and set the drive to AHCI or you won't get the speed bump from using a SSD...
after youv'e got windows installed the connect the hard drive back up and go to administrative tools device management...storage and format the hard drive in preparation for using it to contain all your data...
only install your OS and programs to the SSD ...move the my documents to the hard drive

[rhymin]

I figured it out.

I use 2 graphix cards and one of them was bad.

I just took the top one out, put the other one in the main slot, and I had no more problems.

I now installed the O/S on the SSD and everything is working smoothly.

Thanks for your time.

[happyrock]

great now these should be done right away...
if all listed below aren't followed the SSD they will wear out faster

move your documents folder to the hard drive

create a new downlods folder on the hard drive and set all your browsers to download to it


Disabling the page file or Moving the page file from your SSD to a storage hard drive

turn off Hibernation SuperFetch and Defrag
You can disable hibernate by running the command from the Command Prompt:

powercfg /hibernate off


Make sure that TRIM is enabled

if you've already migrated to an SSD, you might not have realized that you're sacrificing performance with misaligned partitions. A regular hard drive usually starts its first partition after 63 empty blocks, while SSDs require 64 blocks of data for optimal performance. This means that sometimes, if your SSD was formatted by something other than Windows' installer, it can be aligned incorrectly and will transfer data much slower than intended


To see if your partitions are aligned correctly, hit the Start menu and type in msinfo32. Enter Msinfo32 and go to Components ... Storage ... Disks. Look for your SSD on the list and find the "Partition Starting Offset" item. If this number is divisible by 4096 (that is, if dividing it by 4096 equals a whole number and not a decimal), your partition is correctly aligned. If not, you need to realign it.

you can't assume windows did it right...it only did 3 out of 4 on my system