Booting to Expresscard (Win 7)

W

wesalex

Member
So, I got easyBCD because guys over at reboot.pro were talking about its simplicity over grub4dos when multibooting and chainloading. I am looking to speed up my Latitude e6500(C2D 2.66, NV Quadro 160M, 4GB 800mhz)'s lousy spinning platter hard drive.

That's where the problems start...

The only available bay in the darn thing is an expresscard 54 port, which is convenient enough (got a good price on a 32GB expresscard ssd, enough space to install 7 if I keep the spinning drive for media and work files).

The computer has Dell's latest BIOS installed (Dell A29, June 2013) and yet after several years of expresscards being mainstream, Dell refuses to give them any more support than a glorified flash drive.
The BIOS will not let me set the SSD to the Boot disk, and Windows install won't get past the homepage because of this.

What are the motions to either chainload into the expresscard or to force the drive bootable?

I appreciate the help, the Latitude's performance is fantastic everywhere except hard disk speed!
 
After poking around EasyBCD for a bit, I enabled the Bios Extender, which does exactly what it advertised-new startup menu where I can manually select the expresscard (thanks neosmart). However, I can only get as far as the mandatory 'Press ctrl alt delete to restart' prompt because windows still will not let me install to the supposedly non bootable ssd. Is there a utility that sidesteps or overrides the (for lack of a better term) 'BIOS Bootable' flag in windows setup?

---------- Post added at 12:56 AM ---------- Previous post was at 12:54 AM ----------

Throw out my previous comment...The BIOS extender is listing:

HDA Partition1
HDA Partition2
Floppy
CDrom
USB

I am assuming that HDA Partition 1&2 are on the same physical drive, in this case, the old windows install and recovery partition. If this is right, then the Expresscard is not getting picked up by it either...
 
Last edited:
wesalex said:
After poking around EasyBCD for a bit, I enabled the Bios Extender, which does exactly what it advertised-new startup menu where I can manually select the expresscard (thanks neosmart). However, I can only get as far as the mandatory 'Press ctrl alt delete to restart' prompt because windows still will not let me install to the supposedly non bootable ssd. Is there a utility that sidesteps or overrides the (for lack of a better term) 'BIOS Bootable' flag in windows setup?

---------- Post added at 12:56 AM ---------- Previous post was at 12:54 AM ----------

Throw out my previous comment...The BIOS extender is listing:

HDA Partition1
HDA Partition2
Floppy
CDrom
USB

I am assuming that HDA Partition 1&2 are on the same physical drive, in this case, the old windows install and recovery partition. If this is right, then the Expresscard is not getting picked up by it either...
Click to expand...

The ssd could be connected via USB interface...
The expresscard interface has both pcie pins and usb pins.. Wireless nics and such usually connects via the usb pins and maybe so does your storage...
If that would be the case you would have to check on how to install windows 7 to a usb drive...
If not check how your existing windows install picks up the disk (if it does)...
 
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