JNavas
Member
I purchased a new laptop with HDD (320GB 7200RPM) and upgraded it myself with mSATA SSD (80GB Intel 310).
I took the approach of creating recovery media from HDD, loading and installing Windows on mSATA SSD (C),
and changing the drive letter of the HDD (D) for data, pointing all my user Special Folders there,
and finished by moving the Windows paging file to HDD (D). All went well, and the laptop is running great.
There are, however, some drawbacks to this approach:
I thought all I would need to do is move boot files from SSD to HDD, making HDD bootable and SSD not bootable, but as always, the devil is in the details.
I tried to use EasyBCD:
Although EasyBCD appears to change the Boot Drive from SSD C to HDD D, the change doesn't stick, even though I changed the boot order in the BIOS -- the system keeps booting from SSD C (as evidenced by the BCD file in use).
Thoughts / suggestions? :wtf:
I took the approach of creating recovery media from HDD, loading and installing Windows on mSATA SSD (C),
and changing the drive letter of the HDD (D) for data, pointing all my user Special Folders there,
and finished by moving the Windows paging file to HDD (D). All went well, and the laptop is running great.
There are, however, some drawbacks to this approach:
- Hibernation File (hiberfil.sys) will be located on SSD and cannot be moved to HDD. [6.2GB]
- Recovery Partition will be located on SSD. [9GB]
I thought all I would need to do is move boot files from SSD to HDD, making HDD bootable and SSD not bootable, but as always, the devil is in the details.

- Change boot drive to D:
- Make sure boot partition is Windows C:
Code:
HDD
+-------------------------------------------------+-----------+
| D: user data | Recovery |
| | Partition |
+-------------------------------------------------+-----------+
SSD (mSATA)
+-------------------+
| C: Windows + |
| Programs |
+-------------------+
Although EasyBCD appears to change the Boot Drive from SSD C to HDD D, the change doesn't stick, even though I changed the boot order in the BIOS -- the system keeps booting from SSD C (as evidenced by the BCD file in use).
Thoughts / suggestions? :wtf:
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