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Well, I don't really know where to start, but here I go:
I wanted to get a new laptop instead of my old one and I chose lenovo thinkpad W520. It is quite a good laptop with 2.2GHz i7, 16GB RAM, 2GB dedicated video card....
Because I can't have enough speed, I also decided to use a ssd drive as a boot drive in my laptop and use the original as data drive. I chose the infamous Crucial M4. I bought the 128GB version. The laptop arrived before, and all things seemed to be okay with it. However, my first ever ssd arriving at my doorstep started all kinds of stupid problems or that's what I like to call them.
The process should have been straightforward. Remove the sata mechanical drive, install the almighty M4 in its place, install windows and viola : A powerful laptop just became more powerful. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case, I'll try to narrate what happened as good as I can.
I booted using my windows 7 DVD, but the installation stopped in the middle saying that it couldn't copy some files. I tried again, same thing. The third time it won't detect the M4 and it is asking for a driver! I started suspecting the DVD/DVD drive so I decided to use the same copy of windows placed in my bootable flash drive. It worked, but it also stopped (At a much later stage) because of a write error. I was clueless, but I still suspected my windows copy. That's when I decided to burn a new one. I swapped the drives and ran windows located in the original drive and burned a new dvd from my windows 7 iso. Swapped the drives again, and tried to install windows with the new dvd and it worked. While in my fresh windows installation(after some time), the system went BSOD all of the sudden. I rebooted and it will just do the same. At this point, I started suspecting the laptop overall thinking it might have some hardware problems. I took out the ssd and put back the sata and played with the laptop for hours and did all kind of things with no sign of problems whatsoever. So, I suspected the ssd again.
However, I wanted to try the ssd one more time to see what happens. I created an image of the original sata drive using acronics and loaded it into the ssd. So that now, the ssd is an identical copy of the boot partition of the original sata drive that came with the laptop. This is to put software problems aside.
I turned on the laptop, and it booted just fine to windows with all the programs that were in the sata drive. However, after few moments the whole system will just freeze and I'm left with nothing to do except pressing and holding the power button to turn the laptop off. It kept doing this and I came to the conclusion that the ssd is just bad.
I initiated a thread here asking whether ssd's will work with sata to USB adapters and when I learned that the answer is yes it became certain to me that the ssd is bad. Because it didn't work that way in my laptop. I was almost ready to return the ssd until I tried it in my main desktop machine(This one). In my desktop, it just worked via the adapter. I couldn't find any errors using HD tune and SSDLife free detected the drive and reported no problems. So, what gives?
I'm now thinking it is a compatibility problem. But if it is, what should I do? What more tests should I do? I just hope everything is good because I don't want to go through the hassle of returning stuff since I'm traveling soon.
What do you guys think?
Any help/comment is greatly appreciated.
I wanted to get a new laptop instead of my old one and I chose lenovo thinkpad W520. It is quite a good laptop with 2.2GHz i7, 16GB RAM, 2GB dedicated video card....
Because I can't have enough speed, I also decided to use a ssd drive as a boot drive in my laptop and use the original as data drive. I chose the infamous Crucial M4. I bought the 128GB version. The laptop arrived before, and all things seemed to be okay with it. However, my first ever ssd arriving at my doorstep started all kinds of stupid problems or that's what I like to call them.
The process should have been straightforward. Remove the sata mechanical drive, install the almighty M4 in its place, install windows and viola : A powerful laptop just became more powerful. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case, I'll try to narrate what happened as good as I can.
I booted using my windows 7 DVD, but the installation stopped in the middle saying that it couldn't copy some files. I tried again, same thing. The third time it won't detect the M4 and it is asking for a driver! I started suspecting the DVD/DVD drive so I decided to use the same copy of windows placed in my bootable flash drive. It worked, but it also stopped (At a much later stage) because of a write error. I was clueless, but I still suspected my windows copy. That's when I decided to burn a new one. I swapped the drives and ran windows located in the original drive and burned a new dvd from my windows 7 iso. Swapped the drives again, and tried to install windows with the new dvd and it worked. While in my fresh windows installation(after some time), the system went BSOD all of the sudden. I rebooted and it will just do the same. At this point, I started suspecting the laptop overall thinking it might have some hardware problems. I took out the ssd and put back the sata and played with the laptop for hours and did all kind of things with no sign of problems whatsoever. So, I suspected the ssd again.
However, I wanted to try the ssd one more time to see what happens. I created an image of the original sata drive using acronics and loaded it into the ssd. So that now, the ssd is an identical copy of the boot partition of the original sata drive that came with the laptop. This is to put software problems aside.
I turned on the laptop, and it booted just fine to windows with all the programs that were in the sata drive. However, after few moments the whole system will just freeze and I'm left with nothing to do except pressing and holding the power button to turn the laptop off. It kept doing this and I came to the conclusion that the ssd is just bad.
I initiated a thread here asking whether ssd's will work with sata to USB adapters and when I learned that the answer is yes it became certain to me that the ssd is bad. Because it didn't work that way in my laptop. I was almost ready to return the ssd until I tried it in my main desktop machine(This one). In my desktop, it just worked via the adapter. I couldn't find any errors using HD tune and SSDLife free detected the drive and reported no problems. So, what gives?
I'm now thinking it is a compatibility problem. But if it is, what should I do? What more tests should I do? I just hope everything is good because I don't want to go through the hassle of returning stuff since I'm traveling soon.
What do you guys think?
Any help/comment is greatly appreciated.
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