Windows 7: New SSD and a Windows DVD failure

I installed an OCZ SSD last night, and had a hell of a time getting my operating system partition onto the new drive. I ended up using some recommended migration tool, but despite my best efforts the new drive wouldn't boot (black screen with "Failure to boot" or what have you). I used the windows 7 upgrade DVD to repair the install, and after that it booted perfectly several times.



Today, I tried to boot the system only to get another failure to boot screen. I figured that the issue was probably the bios trying to boot from the old drive rather than the SSD, but this wasn't the case. I decided to pop in the repair disk again, hoping that I could once again cajole it into working. Unfortunately, now the upgrade DVD won't even load! I've been staring at the "Starting Windows" screen for fifteen minutes now to no avail.

I also tried to use the sysrescue cd in hopes of just formatting the SSD with GParted and reinstalling from the Windows DVD. Unfortunately, this disk also had problems. It seemed to hang for several minutes at the "Searching for SATA_something or other" portion, but finally worked. When I loaded GParted, it couldn't even see my SSD! The Bios is still seeing it fine, but GParted won't, and I can't boot the Windows DVD. What in the hell is going on here!?

Note: After at least ten minutes the Windows DVD has booted at least so far as to give me a cursor. This is good, but I still can't fathom why a hard drive problem would cause my DVD drive to work at 1/10th its normal speed.

You should not approach the SSD with tools like Gparted. They are not designed for. It is not clear how you got your system on the disk (recommended migration tool?) If this was "Migrate easy", it should have worked provided you aligned the SSD. Best is to install Windows7 from scratch. Then you get all the necessary settings from the Windows 7 installer.

Right, and I'm happy to do that, only my windows DVD no longer works! I'm currently staring at a blank screen, after 20 minutes of trying to load the DVD. I had a cursor about 5 minutes ago, but it only moves about once every two minutes (showing that it's very laggy or slow to load for some reason). I even tried loading my 32 bit Windows DVD, and that didn't help either. I would love to reinstall fresh, but I am being prevented, and I don't know by what!

I just unplugged the SSD (so that only the traditional hard drive is plugged in) and the windows DVD booted as normal. Now why in the heck would some problem on the SSD prevent the DVD from loading, and how do I fix it?

Maybe you had a bad connection with the SSD SATA cable, have you tried it again?

I plugged in the SSD AFTER booting the Windows DVD, and I was able to format it. However, the installer tells me that "Windows cannot be installed to this disk. This computer's hardware may not support booting to this disk. Ensure that the disk's controller is enabledd in the computer's BIOS menu."

I don't understand that message. Plenty of people from Newegg have reported success with making this their Windows 7 boot drive. Any ideas?

Just out of curiosity, have a look at the tutorial at the link below.

AHCI : Enable in Windows 7 / Vista

I don't know what you did with the formatting. Maybe you want to read this first: Guide VERTEX..single disk installation and windows tweaks. All disk sizes..
And what is the firmware level of the SSD - should be 1.4. or 1.5. if it is a Vertex.

Well Windows installed normally to the SSD. I'm now doing some basic customizations before I reboot to make sure it's ok. I will also read the guides you guys posted. Thank you for your help! I hope this problem has seen itself off, whatever its cause was.

By the way, barefoot's article reminded me, do you guys know of anything I can do to speed up my SSD even more? I got my boot time down from 37 to 29 seconds, but I heard of some guys going as low as 15.

Have a look at this thread and this tutorial at the links below.

ReBoot Time

Optimize Windows 7

You should be looking at the Vertex Forum on OCZ's website. Excellent info & help there...