advice required win8 ssd install

Z3rotol3ranc3

Z3rotol3ranc3

Z3rotol3ranc3

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Joined
12 Jun 2007
Posts
48
hi,need some advice on installing this lot into this lot...
Price Qty Line Total
Samsung 120GB SSD 840 EVO SATA 6Gb/s Basic - (MZ-7TE120BW) £72.49 1 £72.49
Microsoft Windows 8.1 64-Bit DVD - OEM (WN7-00614) £58.29 1 £58.29
sorry about crude cut/paste lol
Operating System
Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit SP2
CPU
Intel Core i5 2500K @ 3.30GHz 37 °C
Sandy Bridge 32nm Technology
RAM
8.00GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 802MHz (9-9-9-28)
Motherboard
Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd. Z68AP-D3 (Socket 1155) 36 °C
Graphics
BenQ xl2411t (1920x1080@144Hz)
BenQ xl2411t (1920x1080@144Hz)
3072MB ATI AMD Radeon R9 200 Series (MSI) 42 °C
Storage
279GB Volume0 (RAID)
Optical Drives
HP DVD Writer 1260t
Audio
Realtek High Definition Audio

So i plan to:
1 put win8 in cd tray and shut down PC
1 plug in sata pwr and data cables to the SSD and secure inside case
3 start pc go into bios select boot from cd(win8.1)
4 this part not so sure presuming..win8 will detect the raid and the ssd. and ask which one to save onto? at which point i have 2 OS's on 2 drives so i guess go bios select SSD as boot drive? how do i then set the old raid0 as a secondary drive? also i guessing/seem to remember hearing cant delete windows? so could i format drive for a clean raid0 for storage...?
or is this the wrong way to go about it?
any advice warmly appreciated
 
ok thanks. no was hoping have raid as storage after.gonna put win8 on ssd.
so my plan should work then? anything i missed? bumping post as need confidence to give it a go lol
 
I am not a PC pro but let me understand this correctly.

You have W7 and data on a single 300GB HD

You are adding a SSD for W8?

Are you able to park your data on a back up HHD, wipe the 300GB and just install your SSD and W8 and then add the conventional HHD as storage.

You would need two drives of similar size to raid them if you want to protect your data to some extent. e.g. 2x 300GB HDD for a striped raid, or ideally 4 x HDD for Raid 10.

There is no reason the add the two drives together in raid, and I guess that would not work with an SSD and a HDD anyway.

Apologies if I have misunderstood. My concern would be if you have your HDD in there and you select it by accident or reformat it without a back up you would wipe the data on your conventional HDD.

Perhaps if you post in a bit of detail what you have - it will be easier for Pros to help
 
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no i have Vista on currnet pc that has 2 150GB raptors in raid0. ie 300 GB stripe

its my understanding i cant upgrade vista to win8 and i wanted a SSD for extra speed,so thought id just put win8 on new drive as it were...

no i dont have any backup storage availible, but not too concerned as mostly just games that i can reinstall anyway.

so i was thinking i would just unplug old HDD,then plug in SSD

boot from win8 CD and install on SSD

then reconnect old HDD to use as storage,this will have old Vista OS still on it so wandering if this will cause issue?

i'm guessing i just set SSD as boot drive in BIOS and HDD as secondary?

would this work?
 
If your SSD is going onto the same controller as your RAID-0 HDDs then make sure that you do NOT try include it in the array or reconfigure it in anyway. The SSD should just add itself in JBOD mode (single disk).

My recommendation would be to remove the power from your HDDs in RAID-0 and do a clean Windows 8 install onto the SSD as the ONLY disk powered up and visible. Once finished, re-power HDDs and make sure RAID-0 comes back online, reconfigure BIOS to boot from SSD and ensure that it all boots up as expected.

You will have a messy left over install of Vista on the HDDs but that's not such a big issue. There is really nothing you can do about that without being able to backup the data you need, flatten the RAID-0 partition and start fresh with backup data copied back on.
 
ok well cant boot win8 from the SSD and i think its because i have out dated BIOS.just noticed on boot up the bios version and message this version only supports hdd and cdrom.so i have pluged old raid with vista back in for now.i believe i have the original bios FA,been on gigabyte site latest version for mobo GA-Z68AP-D3 (rev. 2.0) is UA9.

only thing is none of the update notes for the BIOS versions mentions SSD compatibity,but surely there must be support on latest BIOS version?

so plan to download UA9 BIOS and q-flash from withinn bios...

also stupidly thought win8 hadnt installed properly and reinstalled it lol consuming 25 GB of my 120 GB SSD so before i finish is it posible to reformat SSD and do fresh install or to delete one of the win8 installs? or am i stuck with it now? i thought its not poss to remove windows from a drive,i heard it somewhere...?

any help?
 
Hi

I am not a pro but it is very unlikely that you need to flash your bios, that board came with sata connectors for an ssd, should work. There is a risk when you flash the bios that it gets screwed up so don't do that willy nilly!

If you have your 'normal' HDD working and the PC without the SSD in, you can turn it off, plug in the SSD and turn on the PC and reformat the SSD and it will be back to an empty drive.

http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/how-to-reformat-a-drive-in-windows-vista.html
 
yeah that could work ...

but like i say i just noticed message on statup screen which says something about bios version blah blah..'this only support hdd and cdrom'

u could be right tho thinking about it as when in bios trying get win8 to boot,selecting primary boot drive or simalar name to that,it had options:
0 SSD
1 add in card
so yeah maybe bios not the problem.

well when i try start win8 it starts to boot then i just left with blue screen,as if its about to launch into windows but dosnt.

anyhow i got my techy friend coming round to help in few mins so i let u know how it goes lol

thanks Jpod
 
what did you do set the sata ports to raid mode,ide or ahci mode? did you do that before you installed windows?
 
My pleasure Z3, a techy friend coming around always saves the day.

Top tip they usually like Twiglets and cats
 
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