EricBall's Tech Projects

So after a bunch of online shopping, I'm going with a local B&M store (with an online presence) with lower prices than Newegg! Going local also means a) no shipping costs, b) I have it in my hands today, & c) easier to yell at someone in person if it's DOA.

 

I'm getting a SanDisk SSD and Corsair RAM. SanDisk has a Canadian RMA process in case it fails, and they make their own flash, which should balance out the SandForce controller.

 

I'll update when I've got it installed and see how it works.

Eric 0 Murphy +1

 

Argh! I put in the RAM and SSD, cloned the HD to the SSD and now I've got a blank screen instead of Windows boot. Both are working 'cause my GParted USB boot works & sees the SSD. So now I have to pry into the netbook again & swap the HD back in to make sure that at least works.

 

The problem is getting into the netbook is harder than even the YouTube video shows. (You have to pry off the keyboard to get at the screws holding on the bottom access panel, then pry off the access panel. The actual RAM & SSD swap is trivial.) The problem is there's no good way to get leverage on the keyboard to start popping it out. I've already damaged the F4 key on the first go-round along with two on the access panel.

 

In hindsight I should have attached the SSD via the USB adapter and done the clone that way rather than putting in the SSD first. Then I would have found out GParted can't resize while cloning, which meant I had to resize then clone. I've resized NTFS partitions before, but Windows always needs a full chkdsk boot to resync afterwards and I would have preferred to do that before the clone. Then I could have also verified everything worked before putting it all back together. Sigh

So I've determined it's not the RAM by putting the HD back in. Windows 7 Starter Edition boots fine & sees all 4GB (although it will only use 2GB). It's happy with the resized partition too. So it's something with the SSD. I re-cloned all of the partitions and double checked the partition flags & UUIDs - all the same. Still no joy. I even set the BIOS to IDE without success.

 

I think the next step is to make a Windows Repair USB, boot from that and see what it says. Of course, this is tougher since it's a netbook so I can't just burn a DVD.

Got it working. I borrowed a USB DVD burner from work and made a Repair DVD, but it didn't fix the problem. But I noticed it seemed to be complaining about partitions, so I did what I should have done previously - used dd to copy the MBR & partition table. That did the trick. It booted into the repair partition on the drive, fixed something (probably undoing what the previous repair did) then booted into Windows. (Which had to install the driver for the SSD).

 

I've tweaked the Windows config slightly (disabling some of the indexing & prefetch / superfetch). Nothing too agressive, 'cause the system has low RAM and a moderate sized SSD. So disabling the pagefile & hibernation isn't necessary IMHO.

 

So now I get to road test it and see if my upgrade actually does anything noticable.