Add SSD As Second Hard Driver on Laptop and Install Windows 7 to Boot System

2013-12-07


Actually this article could be as the part 4 of  “Add SSD As Second Hard Driver on Dell Studio 1535”.

After we took out optical driver from laptop and replaced by a new SSD to get the second hard driver on laptop, we can install new Windows system on the SSD to get more fast system boot.

Some people said they could not boot their laptop after they installed Windows 7 on the new SSD which is the 2nd hard driver, we do not know how they did, but for our case, we could install the new Windows 7 system on our SSD and boot the laptop without any problem, we now get really faster boot speed and faster application launch speed (such as Microsoft Visual Studio and Blend) as long as we installed these software on SSD.

The Steps:

1: Update the laptop BIOS (Optional):

This step is optional, we did it because we thought our laptop never updated BIOS. Here is our BIOS update process;

2: Set 1st boot item to USB boot, which should be set in BIOS. This let us boot through USB later;

3: Now we should install new Windows 7. We need to boot through a Windows 7 CD or a USB driver which the Windows 7 system files are on it;

We did not have a USB Windows 7 system but only Windows 7 CD, but we have taken out our optical driver, so we connected an external optical driver through USB port, and boot the laptop using a Windows 7 CD.

image 4: Just followed the Windows 7 installation wizard to install, When asking you Where you want to install Windows, you choose the new partition which indicates your new SSD driver; image (Note: During the install processing, your laptop will have to reboot several times, each time when reboot, your laptop will ask you like the following one: Press Any Key to Boot from CD… please remember DO NOT press any key so that the system could continue the installation, if you press a key, your laptop will boot through CD again, which could not continue the install process. 5: After some while, you can see the multiple boot interface which similar with the following screen shot (The “Windows 7” is just our new Windows 7 boot item), now you should boot system from new SSD, you just enjoy the faster system and application loading. image If you have previous Windows 7 system installed, you might see there are 2 Boot items named Windows 7, you can change one name using BDCEdit command: 1: Run Command Prompt **as Administrator**, and input **bcdedit,** you can see your current boot items, the identifier is <current> means your default boot item: image 2: change the boot item description for new SSD boot, for example, you can input “bcdedit /set <current> Description “Windows 7 (SSD)” to give a new boot item name to “Windows 7 (SSD)” image