SSD Boot Strangeness, W510. Machine or Disk?

[cheetahdriver]

When I first got my W510, I moved the 256Gb SSD (Crucial) from my T60p to the W510. After shifting all my old files to a spinning disk with Acronis, I moved the W510 hard drive factory image over to the SSD the same way. There was much happiness, as the T60p with the SSD actually seemed faster than the W510, and the W510 screamed with the SSD. Fast forward to yesterday, and I start getting a boot error halfway into Win7(64) that says boot device not found, even though it is starting Win7 and making it through the little multicolor flag. A bit of research shows that this problem seems to be related to some error on the disk, and I had noticed that I was occasionally restarting out of hibernation, instead of getting the session back. This problem was noted by several people in their discussion of the issue. Being on the road, I decided to go get a copy of Win7 and a new SSD, and see if I could repair the existing installation, and if not, install the new SSD and build from scratch. No repair was possible (it appeared that there was some strangeness with the bootable volume) but when I put the old SSD in a USB drive bay I could access the files fine. A day worth of installations, and I had a minimally functional W510 back, with all new drivers downloaded off Lenovo, and everything appeared to be fine.

However, last night i had a problem restarting the unit, which showed up again today. It freezes at the Lenovo Thinkpad screen (the "Hit the blue Lenovo button..." one). Pressing the blue button gets rid of the "Hit the blue Lenovo button.." instruction but nothing else happens. I also tried doing an F12, and that gets me a "Preparing Boot List" note at the bottom, but nothing ever comes of it. After a couple of power cycles, I finally get a boot, and everything appears fine, until the next shutdown.

So do I have a bad SSD? A W510 going out? Something else? I have a spare W510 at the office, but didn't have them send it out to me yesterday, now I am kicking myself...

[cheetahdriver]

Well, some more strangeness to report. The machine will boot up after 4 to 6 attempts with the new drive. If you let it set long enough, it will come back with Boot Device not found HDD0. Cycle power again and it starts up and runs fine. I am thinking i may try getting a spinning disk and see if it does any better than the second SSD. have run tests on it with a couple of programs and it comes back as fine....

[cheetahdriver]

it was a bad disk.