Thinkpads Forum

I bought this SSD drive. Put the old HDD in place of ithe DVD-ROM and the put the new SSD in place of the HDD. At that time everything worked time. Windows was loading fine, and it recognized the new SSD drive. So I decided to have a fresh install of Win 7 on SSD. I downloaded an MSDN copy of Win 7 to the old HDD and installed Win 7 from there to SSD.

Several times during the installation I was getting a black screen with a cursor. I had to restart the laptop, and the installation would continue. Now, after the installation is completed, I can't restart my laptop without getting a black window. So I have to go to BIOS and change the boot order so that the old HDD stays higher on the boot list than the new SSD. Then Windows Boot Manager pops up with two options for Windows 7. The first one loads Windows from SSD and the second one loads Windows from HDD.

Could somebody please tell me how I can get rid of the black screen and have Windows load automatically from SSD?

Take the old HDD out and physically set it aside from your laptop. Set the boot order in BIOS. Do a fresh install. Unlike the old days it's going to take a while to update (2 days in my case). Upon fresh install I did have a few instances of blank screens upon start up. However once all the updates were applied there's been no more issues after 2 months of daily usage.

Once everything is working good on the new SSD, reformat and use your old HDD for data if you wish.

Cigarguy wrote:Unlike the old days it's going to take a while to update (2 days in my case).

Do you mean that is how long it took you to find all the missing drivers? Or what do you mean by update? Two days is a lot of time.

alosito wrote:

Cigarguy wrote:Unlike the old days it's going to take a while to update (2 days in my case).

Do you mean that is how long it took you to find all the missing drivers? Or what do you mean by update? Two days is a lot of time.

Took about 3 hours for Windows Update to return a long list of critical and optional updates. Let it search and do its thing...be patient. About 1 year after Win 7 was release this took about 1-2 min (the old days). So a lot of it was checking for updates, walk away, apply updates which took about an hour (minus the Win 10 stuff as posted elsewhere here), walk away, check for more updates, walk away, apply more updates, etc. It does get faster and faster but the first few times took a while. Finally I run and apply the relevant Lenovo System Updates.

I just installed a SSD too into my T520. The installation and data migration worked fine except that I could not run a successful backup. I kept getting an error related to not having enough drive space on the partition. This was on a 2 TB backup drive so I didn't understand the error.

My new SSD was in the Ultrabay slot and migrated from the original C drive in the factory location. No blackscreen errors, or any others sort of errors, until I found out I couldn't perform a backup.

I performed a fresh install which finished about an hour ago and I'm still installing programs but I'm almost finished. PS is the last one and Windows is finishing up installing updates.

alosito wrote:I bought this SSD drive. Put the old HDD in place of ithe DVD-ROM and the put the new SSD in place of the HDD. At that time everything worked time. Windows was loading fine, and it recognized the new SSD drive. So I decided to have a fresh install of Win 7 on SSD. I downloaded an MSDN copy of Win 7 to the old HDD and installed Win 7 from there to SSD.

Several times during the installation I was getting a black screen with a cursor. I had to restart the laptop, and the installation would continue. Now, after the installation is completed, I can't restart my laptop without getting a black window. So I have to go to BIOS and change the boot order so that the old HDD stays higher on the boot list than the new SSD. Then Windows Boot Manager pops up with two options for Windows 7. The first one loads Windows from SSD and the second one loads Windows from HDD.

Could somebody please tell me how I can get rid of the black screen and have Windows load automatically from SSD?

I had similar issue, I had a black screen with blinking cursor for quite a while after running through an install, before I gave up. I then removed the SSD and attached it to another ThinkPad with an external USB case and initialized the drive. I don't know for certain if that was the solution, but I was then able to install with no problem.