PC not booting with SSD drive connected?

Mr Benevolent

Wondering about this. I got an OCZ Vertex 2 60GB for Christmas, but everytime I connect the drive it won't boot. It's recognised in the BIOS but since I can't boot whenever it's connected I can't check if its detected in Windows.

The error is "The required boot selection failed because the required device is inaccessible"

The BIOS is configured for SATA (AHCI mode) and I've cleared the BIOS and taken out the motherboard battery a couple of times. I've an ASUS P5Q Pro, E6600 2.4ghz processor and 4GB RAM the PC's never had boot problems before. The SATA cables are fine, the PC has two HDDs and boots fine with them.

Any ideas?

demanufactured

Sounds like its trying to boot from the ssd...you obviously have no OS on the drive.

old_aussie

What SATA port is set in the BIOS as the first SATA to boot from

Mr Benevolent

demanufactured wrote: »

Sounds like its trying to boot from the ssd...you obviously have no OS on the drive.

Nope, no OS on the drive. It's set to boot from a HDD. I want to check the SSD in Windows and update the SSD firmware.

What SATA port is set in the BIOS as the first SATA to boot from

Good question, I'll find out.

Hogzy

Confab wrote: »

Nope, no OS on the drive. It's set to boot from a HDD. I want to check the SSD in Windows and update the SSD firmware.
.

I remember when i was installing a Samsung Spinpoiint 1TB SATA drive the bios wouldnt recognise the drive until it had been formatted. It was very strange. In the end i had to use my old drive with Win Vista installed. Booted from the old drive, installed the new drive and formatted that. Then took out the old drive and installed the new drive and hey presto it worked.

It was a **** load of hassle though.

G-Money

I installed a SSD drive into my machine at Christmas, it already had a HDD in it. So I just swapped over the cables to make sure the BIOS detected the SSD as the first drive.

I then switched it on and booted from the Windows 7 DVD and installed the OS and let it do whatever it wanted to the drive.

Everything worked fine. Have you installed an OS yet?

I know/think Windows Vista was the first Microsoft OS to support solid state drives but I think you had to install something separately or do something different to get it to work. Windows 7 does it automatically.

Mr Benevolent

Can't get into Windows at all with the SSD connected, just keeps giving the error above. Can't even get the Windows installation to fire up and boot from CD! Yet everything works when the SSD is disconnected. The SSD is set to SATA port 1.

unkel

Confab wrote: »

Can't even get the Windows installation to fire up and boot from CD! Yet everything works when the SSD is disconnected. The SSD is set to SATA port 1.

Your problem is that your BIOS wants to boot from your SATA port 1 first. But there is no OS on it

You can do 3 things to solve it:

1. change your BIOS settings to boot from your other hard disk with the OS on it
2. Swap the SATA cables connections on your motherboard
3. there is a shortcut you can press at startup to select what drive you want to boot from (hard disks, DVD, USB, etc.). Look carefully at boot up time and press this key and just select your drive with the OS in the pop-up menu

G-Money

Yeah it sounds like your BIOS may be trying to boot from a drive that no longer exists or which doesn't have an OS on it.

I kept my HDD and swapped over the SATA cables so that the new SSD would be considered to be the main drive by the BIOS. I probably could have made a change in the BIOS settings instead but I figured swapping the cables was the easiest option.

Mr Benevolent

Thanks all, finally got Windows installed on it, works fine now.