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July 5th, 2017 07:00

Inspiron 7720SE 1TB HD replacement with 500GB SSD

Greetings,

This would seem to be such a simple swap operation to replace the slow 1TB drive with a much faster 500GB SSD, but something is missing.

Using the MS Windows 10 Pro installation CD, the install process appears to successfully run to completion with no problems reported.  However, after trying to reboot, this laptop still consistently reports "no operating system found". 

Separate examination of the SSD  after the installation process (extracted the drive and examined on another Win10 system) shows the SSD has the expected collection of Windows files.  As I understand it, there should be a Master Boot Record (MBR) installed on the SSD that the machine must be able to find at startup, but perhaps it cannot locate the MBR for whatever reason.  Am I missing a step somewhere?  After having installed various versions of windows on many machines over the years, this one seems to have some unique problems.   FWIW: Dell's original setup for the I7720 appears to have RAID enabled for the 32GB SSD (presumably on used as a cache) but I find no documentation for the setup of that device in combination with the primary internal drive.  Perhaps some tweaking of parameters is required to make the 32GB SSD play nice with the new 500GB SSD?

Can anyone point to some documentation and/or tips/tricks to properly configure the HW to boot with the new 500DB SSD?  

I anticipate that this is one of those things that is 'simple after you know where to look', but after a number of different approaches and lots of searching for some useful documentation, this installation has hit a dead end.

9 Legend

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87.5K Posts

July 5th, 2017 08:00

The SSD is likely slimmer than the hard drive you've replaced -- you may need a spacer to install the SSD so it securely connects to the mainboard.

You don't need (and should remove) the 32G SSD when installing the native SSD -- and switch the SATA operation over to AHCI from RAID.

Spacer:

www.amazon.com/.../B014LQM6I2

2 Posts

July 6th, 2017 07:00

For reference: Updated Status upon resolution.

Installation was successful last night, Wed 5 July, 2017

---Summary---

* Bought the new SSD:  Samsung 850 PRO - 512GB - 2.5-Inch SATA III Internal SSD

* Inserted the new SSD;

* Ctrl+I at startup, then disable the RAID 0;

* Cycle power;  install the clean OS from the Win10Pro CD (i.e., Win10Pro instead of Win10Home)

* Run the normal boot process from the new SSD

* All is good!

* The Inspiron 7720 is much faster now:

** Much faster SSD, makes a big difference in perceived overall system performance;

** Fast CPU -- Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3610QM CPU @ 2.30GHz;

** RAM is limited to 8GB max.

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