Windows 7: Installing Windows 7 on a SSD partition of a 1TB HDD

I have a Lenovo Y480 laptop and since i've gotten the laptop I've always been disappointed that they never installed Windows 7 on my SSD portion of the hard drive. So now I want to do it myself but I've having some issues with it due to my situation.

So i was following the guide from seven forums and decided to try and do it the easy way with Paragon Migrate and the program did not pick up my ssd. Saying that I only have one hard drive

The reason for that is because the ssd is a part of the actual 1TB hard drive and not a separately connected drive.

I also got lost in translation upon following the guide and need someone to break it down much simpler because I have installed windows on multiple machines and it does not seem that complicated. I just need to move my OS and nothing else. I would like to keep my programs right where they are.

Also, could I just mount a Windows 7 ISO on a flash drive, boot from the flash drive, install it on the ssd and properly remove windows from the 1TB portion. I know that would cause a loss in drivers and such but how would i transfer all that data over?

Bottom line, I would like to move my OS to the SSD portion of my hard drive and i'm trying to find the simplest, and most effective way of doing it, and I can't seem to find any answers in comparison to my situation due to the fact that most people just install a SSD separately.

Notes:
I can't seem to format the partition because I keep receiving an error saying that there are disk utilities and other programs using this drive. I have nothing running accessing this drive other than something I don't know about or system related. I need a way to solve that too

Much appreciated




Specs for the hell of it
3rd generation Intel Core i7-3610QM Processor
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
NVIDIA GeForce GT640M-LE
1TB 5400RPM+32GB SSD
8.0GB DDR3 RAM

First, the SSD (Solid State Drive) is separate it is NOT physically part of the hard drive.

Some vendors only use the SSD for certain data functions and not the Operating System. I've seen this on some new Dell's with both a hard drive and SSD. If its set up that way, it would be a major task to reinstall everything on the SSD.

You may want to leave it that way, I recently bullt a new desktop system for my recording studio and used an SSD for the Operating System and the recording studio software, everything else on a 1TB hard drive. The only real advantage is a slightly faster boot up time, compared to a hard drive system. After talking to several custom builders and others, most agree that SSD drives are still unreliable and they do not recommend or use them. I have since installed another 1TB hard drive and reinstalled everything on the hard drive. I'll use the SSD only for "samples" for use with my recording studio.

Any 1 TB drive does not have any separate SSD or any SSD at all. It does have built in memory to aid in reads and writes to and from the drive but you can not install anything to that.

So you are completely mistaken as to the make up of your 1TB drive.

Looking at the Lenovo site I do see that unit does come with a 32GB SSD. Where it is installed I don't know. But in my honest option the only way to get Win 7 on that SSD, if it isn't already installed on it, is to Wipe the system and Reinstall from scratch making sure you install 7 on the SSD.

Post a screen shot of Disk Management so we can see the makeup of the drives.

If C is on the hard drive, not the SSD, I'd assume this is one of those uncommon laptops where the SSD is used as a caching device, rather than a location for the OS.

I'd further assume that you could wipe everything and install Windows to the SSD rather than the HDD, but 32 GB is pretty small for an OS drive.

But I don't know for sure if the SSDs used for caching are interchangeable with ordinary SSDs.

Maybe you could install Windows only to the SSD and install all programs to the HDD. An updated Windows with no applications occupies 15 or 20 GB as I recall.

We do need to see the picture of Windows Disk Management.

It might be possible to move C to the SSD by cloning or imaging if C is small enough to fit.

May I suggest that you get a $60 seperate 60GB SSD. That will make your life a lot easier. Check fo the sales at Newegg.

Doing a search on this, Google, I find the 32GB SSD is a Cache storage area and no accessible to install anything on.

edwar, Dell does this same thing on some of their models, including the "latest and greatest" XPS8500 desktops (with the SSD option).

If the user wants to install a larger SSD drive (I would recommend 128GB) then the most reliable, according to several custom PC builders (for commerical recording and video applications) is Intel SSD's.

But, I go back to my original statement to leave it as is.

No question as to installing a Real SSD but that was Not the OPs question. His question was about installing the OS on the SSD. There is NO SSD on these models. There is a Flash storage area, whether in the physical HDD or a separate system, that is used as File Cache area and can not be accessed natively. IE nothing can be installed on it by the User. It is used by the drive and or system electronics only.

We've had several of these recently. I'd read your model's Manual from the Lenovo Support Downloads webpage closely to make sure you're utilizing the SSD caching, which may improve the performance of your large HD sufficiently you don't want to upgrade.

Once you're sure of this one way or the other, then you can make a fully knowledgeable decision about adding another SSD.

Let us know how it goes.