Hi, I´m trying to replace my SATA HDD with an SSD in my Alienware m14xR2. This model has a mSATA SSD conector, but I don´t have it installed. I´ve tried with two different SSD´s, one from Kingston (HyperX Fury 240GB) and ADATA (XPG SX900 256GB) and got different results.
In both cases I´ve tried cloning the SSD´s from the original HDD (the laptop works fine with it, everytime I put it back in the system, so the SATA conector works fine), I´ve tried a clean windows install and even with the emergency disk created from the HDD.
When I tried with the Kingston, in the beginning, it showed Kingston in the first BIOS setup screen, under HDD, but after I tried to boot, I got a ´No boot device, check the cables´ message, and after I check the setup, it showed HDD Not Detected in place of Kingston in this main screen. In Legacy boot order just showed ´Network´ (no Hard Disk option). Every attempt with this brand was not detected by BIOS. Even diagnostic showed ´No hard disk detected´ message. I tested the SDD in other Laptop and worked fine. It did it fine too in a desktop motherboard, so the SSD is fine. Just was not detected by the m14XR2 BIOS. I tried this with 2 different SSD from this brand and model with the same results.
When I tried with the ADATA SDD, it seems that the BIOS detected it better, always showed ADATA in the main BIOS setup screen, but I could not make it boot. Sometimes after I´ve tried to reboot, and even when it still showed ADATA as HDD in the main BIOS setup screen, it was not showed as a boot option in the Boot section. After using Alienrespawn to restore the system to the factory state and it suppesed to finish successfully, I just got Á disk read error occurred. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to reRECOVERY´ when I tried to reboot from the ´restored´SSD.
I have the most recent BIOS version for this model (A8), the SATA operation it is selected to AHCI all the time and I´m running out of ideas. Any help is welcome.
Best Regards.