Problem upgrading my SSD to Samsung 850 pro

[StevenD]

Hi,
I'm sure this has happened to someone before. I've got a Plextor SSD in my T60p, running XP SP2, and I bought a Samsung 850 Pro, 512GB. Ran CHKDSK on my source drive to make sure everything's OK, connected the Samsung to a USB port, ran the Samsung Data Migration program, which said everything transferred fine.
Next, you guessed it: won't boot from the new drive. I only get the little white blinking cursor in the upper left of the screen.
I put the old drive in, booted up, and re-attached the *new* drive to the USB port, opened Windows Explorer, and I can see everything on the new drive. Looks like the transfer was perfect.
I'd love to know what to do next, if anyone knows!
Thanks,
--Steve D.

[ajkula66]

The new drive should be in the "main" HDD bay, the "old" one in the USB enclosure.

That's the way I've done it for over a decade. Not that I clone stuff often.

Make sure to disconnect the "old" drive once the system goes for a reboot after the cloning is finished.

Good luck.

[Johan]

Steve:

First, check that the BIOS is set to "AHCI"-mode (it probably is, since you've already got a SSD running).

As to the boot-problem with the Samsung 850, try (with the '850 in the main HDD bay) to boot using Hirens boot CD and run the "MbrFix 1.0" tool... as it could sound like your MBR is not functioning? There are various other free MBR-fix tools (Google is your friend!), and if you have the original XP install CD, then that also has the a "Recovery console" which can be used to fix e.g. MBR errors.

Johan

[Hans Gruber]

As was said, install the Samsung drive in the main bay. Connect only the Samsung drive until you have your OS stable. I assume you want to use your Plextor as a surplus or backup drive. Only connect one drive at a time. You may benefit from a clean install on your new drive keeping your current Plextor untouched as a backup.

[StevenD]

Problem solved. Thanks to everyone who posted. By the way, the new drive was not in a bay, but on a cable from the USB port on the computer to the SATA on the drive.

I didn't try the MBRFix thing yet. My 75-year-old guru, who's seen everything, cringed when I told him I used Samsung's migration manager. He said to use Acronis (which I already had, the 2010 version) to clone my HDD to the Samsung.

Went perfectly. Works perfectly. One partition, now 256 Gig free space. I recommend the Acronis highly!!

/SD

[ajkula66]

Did you overprovision the drive?

If you haven't you should. Samsung says 10%, AnandTech 25% and personally I'd go with the latter.

[StevenD]

Uh oh. Didn't know about overprovisioning. In fact, I haven't googled it yet, but I don't even know what it is, and Acronis certainly didn't give me an option. Can I still do it?

[ajkula66]

Can I still do it?

Yes you can.

You might need to download some freeware along the lines of Parted Magic to help you with the process, but first do some reading here:

http://www.samsung.com/global/business/ ... per05.html

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/27844 ... ovisioning

Good luck.

[StevenD]

I'm scared to death do do anything to this drive. I don't trust programs that change things on the drive.

[ajkula66]

Nothing to be scared of.

Create a backup image of your current install, and then proceed with overprovisioning.

If you were running W7 I could likely walk you on completing OP from within Windows, but I have no clue how to do it in XP.

One question: is your XP a retail version, or an IBM/Lenovo load from the restore media?

[JBUK]

If you have used Acronis 2010 to clone then it would be worth checking the partition alignment using for example Aomei partition manager or going into to Windows and running msinfo32 and checking the partition starting offset is divisible by 4096 for all the partitions.