SSD installation
Inquiry about installing a Samsung V-NAND SSD 860 EVO SATA 500gb as a system drive.
I have installed the SSD in Slot 0 (set to non-Raid) to load Windows 10 from a USB. All of that software is fine, but the drive is not recognized.
Is it necessary to make any changes to the BIOS for SSD compared to the previous standard drive?
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Dell Precision T7600
SATA SCSI Drive
16 GB RAM
NVIDIA
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Did you find a solution? I am about to do exactly the same thing. Already have the drive, just downloaded Windows 10 to a flash drive, using slot 0, non-Raid. Was a BIOS change needed, or something else? I have not tried it yet and found your question above. I'd appreciate knowing your outcome. Thanks in advance!
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Ron Nelson Gaylon H Reasons there is a specific driver required to recognize your HDD. Try using the attached file.
You can extract it on to a USB and then use it to load the correct driver when prompted by windows.
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Thank you, Gaylon. Perfect timing, as today is the day. I'm uncertain about the exact sequence of events (never done this), but I guess it'll become clear to me as I go through it? Shutdown, remove all drives, put the SSD in slot 0, boot from the Windows 10 USB, and ... that's when I'll be prompted for the driver? So I'll have two USBs available at the same time, one for the clean boot, the other with the driver?
I'm also wondering whether I first need to Ctrl+I to enter the Intel drive configuration before beginning the windows installation.
If you have answers, great. If not, I'll dive in a hopefully figure it out. Thanks again!
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Didn’t he need to format the drive before it would be recognized? I don’t see any indication that he did that. I wasn’t sure that would be necessary with ssds, but apparently it is.
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I have a similar issue but I think drivers don't apply for my T7610. I picked up a 256GB SSD and installed it in slot 0 moving the 2TB drive from slot 0 to slot 1. I have 4TB drives in slots 2&3 configured as a raid drive. When I boot the system recognizes the 2 TB drive and the logical drive, raid drive, but only recognizes the 256GB as 1024MB. I tried changing to UEFI in the Boot options list but that does not seem to help instead eliminating the list of drives and replacing them with boot sequences of Win boot mngr and ESXi. Any idea what I am doing wrong? My goal is to boot esxi from the 256 with the 2TB being data for virtual systems and the Logical drive available to the virtual machines for boot and storage. This way I can boot many OSs to run different versions of games
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Christopher Eckert so right now you have an empty 256 SSD correct? Make that the only drive in the system. Configure the bios to what it needs to be. I'm assuming your using onboard raid so I would imagine the scenerio would be Sata operation- raid
Bios operation - uefi
Legacy option rom - off
Secure boot - off
Then try to boot to your installation media. I have never played with esxi so I can't help from there. It's on my bucket list of stuff to learn though.
Also if it matters what I typically do first with any old PC is update the bios. I love to use windows to do it. So I typically install windows even if I don't want to use it to just run through the bios updates then when I'm all caught up I install Linux or whatever I originally planned on.
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Rob, thank you. I will pull everything else and boot with just the ssd although I dont know if the 2013 7610 with the latest bios will work with a sata 3 ssd at this point.
The interesting thing is that the reason I need something small and quick is that VMWare made ESXi 7 not able to use flash cards to boot from. ESXi needs a drive to boot from and a drive to run data on. I am just trying to find something to boot from at this point
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Christopher Eckert a Sata 3 SSD will 100 percent work in that machine. It will work with anything that has a Sata port to the best of my knowledge. A couple of years ago I built a really old optiplex and a dimension PC with pata to Sata adapters and used an SSD to install windows 98. 1 was for a friend for his cnc laser and another I sold on ebay for an automated sewing machine on a production line. So I have faith lol. Fyi if you just need some small insignificant boot drive I believe some people with that machine use the onboard USB port on the motherboard and boot off a flash drive. From what I read it's usually to run clover boot loader as a intermediate so we can add nvme boot support to machines of your era. Also I don't have access to the machine anymore but at my last job I had a t3610 running an Intel 545s SSD as a racing simulator rig. Same machine basically just 1 processor. I don't remember any hiccups getting it going.
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And on another note and I could be wrong but reading on esxi it seems that it does not support software raid. Looks like Sata mode needs set to ahci and then if you need raid you have to use a physical raid controller. Try using raid mode first just like I said with boot drive only to start. If it doesn't work change Sata mode in bios to ahci and try again the same way.
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I am starting to think I got a bad drive. Even running that disc alone and changing every setting I could find the drive for s only recognized as 1gb. Going to try another drive to see if it helps
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Christopher Eckert do you have another PC? If not you could do a Linux gparted live USB to check what's going on with that SSD.
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I am going to bring this up again - because I have just gone through the mill for two weeks working with my T7600 drives. I had no clue about how important it is to recognize the difference between MBR and GPT on both SSDs and HDDs.
To run correctly with Windows 10 on a T7600, your system drive should be formatted to EUFI. Then all the other drives should be formatted to GPT.
Google it if you want the details of why this is so.
My boot drive, originally a 256 GB SSD, now a cloned 1T SSD was originally formatted (not by me) to Legacy BIOS. The only way that can be changed is by reformatting the drive to EUFI and reinstalling Windows. You can however, change your DATA ONLY drives to GPT and leave the boot drive as LEGACY.
The reason I did that was because I discovered that Windows would recognize only 2T of my new 6T data drive. Windows will only recognize 2T of a drive formatted to MBR.
For you, the key is that you will need to format your SSD to have Windows recognize it. And choose EUFI when it asks you if you want MBR or EUFI.
Please do let me know if this works for you. I hope I have been clear.
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Shary Flenniken Sorry. I think it will ask you to choose between MBR and GPT. (Not EUFI)
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Shary Flenniken it's the difference between Uefi and legacy bios. You should use uefi on every initial operating system setup that permits it. Windows 7 32 bit is an example of an operating system that needs to be ran as bios/mbr. Other than that I believe on our machines changing it to uefi and turning legacy option rom off it makes sure to install your system in gpt. I also use Rufus to make all my install media as well because you can chose to make the media in uefi mode. You should also be downloading an uefi 64 bit iso for your installation.
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Rob Frank Thanks! How and where would I find this... "downloading an uefi 64 bit iso for your installation."
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Shary Flenniken I probably shouldn't have phrased it like that. You CAN install a 64 bit iso at least most of them as a legacy mbr install. What you need to start out with anyways is 64 bit. Personally I use this tool. https://www.heidoc.net/joomla/technology-science/microsoft/67-microsoft-windows-and-office-iso-download-tool
It pulls downloads straight from Microsoft. Nothing illegal just a fast easy way of finding the iso you want.
A note. I ONLY use a 32bit iso if it's a hardware limitation. Such as my PC does not support 64 bit or I have to use a PCI card that only has 32 bit drivers available.
To create a bootable media I use Rufus.
This lets you dictate mbr or gpt on your media. For anyone playing with pcs I would have both of these tools downloaded.
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Rob Frank Thanks, Rob. Rufus seems very handy. However, the link to heidoc.net may let you download Win 7, but I don't see Win 10, and there is a note that they lost a lawsuit with Amazon. So I'm not sure that iso download is available.
Are you running a T7600 or anything close? I ask because I would love to convert my legacy bios to UEFI (checked the spelling!) and install a UEFI version of Windows 10 if I can find it. Then boot from a GPT system disk instead of the MBR SSD I am using now.. (Maybe using the MBR2GPT tool?) However, I believe the stock system board on the T7600, which is LGA2011, cannot support UEFI. Do you know?
I am still trying to figure out if this is worth the effort. I am already running several GPT drives that are data-only.
Meanwhile I am looking for a workstation as convenient as the T7600 that will support an all UEFI system and Win 11 or its successors.
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Shary Flenniken Oldest I know on a precision is going to be a T3610 and it could be used as UEFI. I really think your 7600 should as well. Fairly easy to go into the bios and check. and here is a screen shot of heidoc iso tool on my PC right now showing you that you can get windows 10. I'm doing some computer work right now but if I have time later I'll boot into bios and take some photos of what you should be looking for. I do believe you should still have the same GUI style bios that I have on my T5810.
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Shary Flenniken windows 11 is seemingly hard to use right now on old hardware. 8th gen Intel or newer. If you want a Dell workstation that new it's still big bucks. I'm going to play with trying to make it work on my son's T5810 and if I can make it work and all the auto updates work then I'll post about it.
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Rob Frank That was fun! I had to poke around on that website, but finally got it. Would not have been able to do that without your screenshot. So helpful! Thank you so much!
I saved the ISO to one of my drives and vaguely remember burning a working image to CD/DVD. So I can do that if necessary. ( Sounds like copying it to USB to install Windows from that is more complicated.)
There are people on the internet who say you can get Win 11 even if you cannot enable TPN. You just won't get all the features.
I'm not in a hurry to move to 11. Are you? I think it is still evolving.
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Shary Flenniken not in a hurry for 11 just upset about it. And I'd still highly recommend using Rufus and using a USB. I rarely hang onto a win 10 iso due to updates. I'd rather download the most current iso and load that then wait on 3 hours of windows updates. Like I said when I have a chance I'll take pictures of my bios settings for you and I'll even take some screenshots of Rufus on setup. What I like about today with modernish computers is being able to use a good USB 3.0 flash drive and I'm loading windows into a SSD. Makes installation really fast. Takes a decent amount of time to transfer 4GB off of a DVD... I actually plan on getting a nvme enclosure and a small nvme drive to start using for installs.
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I have added a NVME drive to my Dell T3500. I cannot boot from this drive. I am exploring Clover Boot Manager on a small Sata SSD to boot the NVME drive. Has any one gone down this road???
