SSD Upgrade - Pulling my hair out!

[DirthNader]

I'm at my wit's end trying to get an Intel X25-V SSD to work in my HP Mini 311 netbook running XP Home SP3.

I formatted the drive using my Vista desktop, setting the allocation size to 4096 and verifying the alignment / offset at 1024KB. While the drive was in my desktop I updated the firmware to the latest version. Checked the drive out w/ SSD toolbox, all looked well - the drive accepted the trim command which was important since this would eventually go into an XP system.

The netbook did not ship with recovery media, so I used nLite to build an XP install using the contents of the i386 folder on the netbook's HDD, slipstreaming in SP3 and the most recent drivers listed on HP's support site. I then used Win2Flash to make a bootable USB thumb drive. Install of XP went smoothly.

Now the problem. After the install I have not been able to boot from the HDD. I get the old "blinking cursor at the top left after POST". I can boot off of the thumb drive, select "GUI setup" (as opposed to text-based setup / recovery console), and the netbook then boots and loads the XP install from the HDD. I'm guessing this is a bootloader / MBR problem, but I've tried the usual fixes for this problem (recovery console -> fixmbr / fixboot). No love.

Two oddities that may help; 1.) installing Intel SSD toolbox on the netbook, it tells me that trim is not supported and 2.) trying to run chkdsk /r from the recovery console tells me that chkdsk cannot be found.

 

[dfuze]

As far as I understand, TRIM will only run under 7, not XP, but I am not sure if that is causing part of the problem.

 

[DirthNader]

Intel drives have the trim command (manually) supported via their SSD toolbox program. It's the primary reason I went with an Intel SSD over something from OCZ, Kingston, etc.

I'm thinking it's a problem w/ Win2Flash. I may purchase an external CD drive and use a bootable ISO created from nLite. My old man just moved from a standard laptop to a thin-and-light, so I see the need for an external drive in my near future...

 

[DirthNader]

Well, it was something in Win2Flash, and I had no luck with any other utilties to boot from a thumb drive. I picked up a cheap USB DVD drive, created a bootable ISO with nLite, and all is well.

Still can't trim the drive using SSD toolbox, I'm guessing that it's an issue with the nVidia ION SATA drivers.

 

[obake]

I'm at my wit's end trying to get an Intel X25-V SSD to work in my HP Mini 311 netbook running XP Home SP3.

I formatted the drive using my Vista desktop, setting the allocation size to 4096 and verifying the alignment / offset at 1024KB. While the drive was in my desktop I updated the firmware to the latest version. Checked the drive out w/ SSD toolbox, all looked well - the drive accepted the trim command which was important since this would eventually go into an XP system.

The netbook did not ship with recovery media, so I used nLite to build an XP install using the contents of the i386 folder on the netbook's HDD, slipstreaming in SP3 and the most recent drivers listed on HP's support site. I then used Win2Flash to make a bootable USB thumb drive. Install of XP went smoothly.

Now the problem. After the install I have not been able to boot from the HDD. I get the old "blinking cursor at the top left after POST". I can boot off of the thumb drive, select "GUI setup" (as opposed to text-based setup / recovery console), and the netbook then boots and loads the XP install from the HDD. I'm guessing this is a bootloader / MBR problem, but I've tried the usual fixes for this problem (recovery console -> fixmbr / fixboot). No love.

Two oddities that may help; 1.) installing Intel SSD toolbox on the netbook, it tells me that trim is not supported and 2.) trying to run chkdsk /r from the recovery console tells me that chkdsk cannot be found.

I have wasted about 2 days trying to fix booting issues with another HP (h.as p.roblems) laptop, but discovered something that may be of interest:

Friends Hp dv6930us with vista, drive crashed so he got a OCZ vertex3 and win7 upgrade. Win7 refused to initialize the drive, including using usb adapter to connect. Fortunately my desktower has win7 & XP and XP had no problem reformatting it. So I install win7 (after a couple tries). It runs just great...when it boots. Tried tons of things that didn't affect the issue like rewriting MBR etc:

What i find is that the laptop fails to recognize the os/ssd about 6-10 times out of 10! On forums a HP mini pc user suggested inserting a USB drive can sometimes help (some kind of USB and SSD controller issue that confused mobo)... and it does!

Spent about 2 hours testing it out and have a :
*Without doing anything loads 1-2/10 or worse. (posts, then black screen with or without blinking _) Not a screen issue.
*Add or Remove USB thumbdrive (just a regular thumbdrive) before next boot = 100% success rate. Can't beat that.
*simply leaving a thumbdrive in all the time doesn't work (has to see a change)

It doesn't matter whether you add/remove while in windows or while shut-down, all that matters is that you force it to see a new or missing USB storage device compared to the last boot. (note that simple moving same USB thumbdrive to another slot did NOT work, but adding a 2nd thumbdrive not previously there did or simply removing the 1st one)

Hope that helps. It may not be an elegant fix, but it works reliably.
+1 on the intel drives for XP trim support. I have build 2 pc's with them for that reason.