Thinkpads Forum

Will the T420 accept and mSata drive for it's C drive when doing a fresh Win 7 64bit install?

I tried installing an mSata and initially it was working OK... that is until I tried installing the regular hard drive as a second drive, then it kept trying to boot from the second drive and no matter what I tried I could not get it to recognize the mSata while the second drive was installed (which was a regular mechanic drive, not an SSD)

When I removed the second drive (which was formatted clean and had nothing on it), it would boot from the mSata as normal and functioned just fine.

So, will the T420 accept the mSata?

If so, how can I have the mSata as the C drive for the OS to run from and then have a second mechanical drive?

The unit I'm working with is lightly used (looks brand new) but came off lease from a business environment... so do I need to use the Lenovo updater and let it update the BIOs to solve this?

Or, do you think it's just some settings in the BIOs I have not adjusted correctly for the laptop to be able to peacefully co-exist with a mSata and a mechanic drive as it's second hard drive?

Ideas on what to try would be appreciated...

Yep a mSata drive can be set as the initial boot drive. Hit F1 upon BIOS check to go into BIOS. Set your drive order to recognize the mSata drive first and away you go.

Cigarguy wrote:Yep a mSata drive can be set as the initial boot drive. Hit F1 upon BIOS check to go into BIOS. Set your drive order to recognize the mSata drive first and away you go.

And, then install the second drive?

I always have the CD=Rom drive as first boot device in case I need to use the Acronis recover disk, and then I make my C drive into the second boot device.

I tried tinkering with the BIOs setting before and all worked great with the mSata drive ... until I installed the second mechanical drive, and then it would not recognize the mSata which is the C drive

It just keep trying to boot from the 2nd drive... and when I remove it, it boots from the mSata.

I think the business that was using this was booting from a LAN or something.

Yeah that's pretty much it. I'm pretty sure you got the main HDD as higher priority boot drive than the mSATA drive, therefore it picks the HDD first. I never set the CD/DVD drive as the primary boot as I seldom ever use a CD/DVD anymore. When and if I do, I hit F12 on startup to manually pick my boot drive.

Once I installed the mechanical drive... the mSata drive no longer shows up in the BIOs

So, there must be some strange settings somewhere I'll need to find cause I think LAN was the other boot option that was showing up.

with both drives installed, try pressing F12, see if you find the msata drive there

OK, I'll try that.

I won't have time to get back on this until the weekend but if I still cannot figure it out and I'll be back with other questions I'm sure.