Will the SATA 250GB SSD Blue work as boot drive in Dell Inspiron 531 running Vista? Where / can i find a vista compatible driver for this drive? Any reason to think formatting drive and installing Vista from CD shipped with system won’t work smoothly? Do i need to separately purchase the 3.5" adapter? Thanks in advance!
that computer only has a SATA 2 interface so the drive will only have SATA 2 speed. Vista does not need any driver. the sata drivers are native so it should work. Yes you would need to purchase the 3.5" adapter desperately. that being said I would definitely support upgrading both the OS and computer to be honest.
Thank you drlucky! I will purchase the 250GB SSD.
I have already separately purchased a new PC as my primary … which failed within 2 weeks. So this old 531 will be a backup.
I’m interested to know if your suggestion to upgrade involves new components in the 531 or simply a different system. If new components, what would you suggest? Cheers
I attempted to install vista ultimate 32 bit onto the WDC blue 250GB SSD device yesterday. So far I’ve not been successful, and so have some questions which I hope to get answered toward eventual success.
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When I installed the SSD to SATA0 and first started the PC, the F2 setup did not show any device attached at SATA0. The only device shown was the DVD drive. Is this expected? I did no formatting or any other kind of initialization prior to this point.
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How should the boot sequence be set? What about when there is no HD recognized? On my first two attempts to install the OS, the boot sequence was set only to DVD. The HD was not configured as a second boot source.
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On first attempt to install Vista from the factory DVD, booting from the DVD drive, I was asked to select the drive to install windows to. The install prompt showed me a generic HD as an option. I attempted to explore options to install drivers. This got me stuck in a sequence of choices I could not back out of. I did not think to put the Dell drivers disk into the DVD drive to try having the system search from this drive. Do I need to install a driver for the SSD when attempting to install Vista on this SSD? If so, should the standard drivers packaged with the machine in 2009 work, or is there someplace I can get a needed driver from the WDC site?
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After finding that the install would not proceed until I provided a driver for the HD, I powered off the machine and restarted the install. On this attempt, when prompted to choose the disk for OS install I simply selected the HD ( there is only the SSD installed in the machine ) and selected “next”. The install seemed to proceed as expected: asking to agree to licensing terms, asking to confirm a custom vs upgrade install, copying windows files, expanding files, installing features, installing updates ( where it seemed to hang for a while ). Then it really hung at “Completing Installation”. I left the machine sitting for a couple of hours and when I returned the message showed that it had failed to reboot and that the installation was cancelled and none of the install changes would be saved. This computer was functional last week ( with a dying HDD ), so I feel relatively confident that the other components off the system are in working order.
What is the likelihood that not showing the HD as a secondary boot source caused this reboot failure during the install process?
What other ideas does the community have about why the machine would have failed to reboot during this final (?) phase of the OS install?
- After these two unsuccessful attempts, I powered off and restarted and changed the setup ( f2 ) to include a HD as a second priority boot source. The SSD was still not shown as a recognized device in the setup screen. On this third and ALL subsequent attempts the computer runs the BIOS and seems to be starting the boot from DVD, but fails to get past the Microsoft Corporation ( logo screen ) with the green/black horizontal progress bar, after showing “loading windows files” ( black and white screen ). I have attempted the install both with setup including HD as a secondary boot source, and not including a second boot source ( as configured in the first two attempts ). No setup config allows me to make the same progress with the install as I made on my first two attempts.
Is there a change to the system ( or SSD ) which would have occurred during the nearly successful install which may now be preventing a subsequent reattempt? Is there something about the state of the SDD after a failed install attempt such that it is no longer going to be recognized/allowed as a valid target for OS installation? ( eg. It’s not really blank anymore, it needs to be reformatted, etc )
Some in the community may wonder why I persist with this old system … There are some old apps which I’d like to preserve in the Vista environment. These includes a Pinnacle ( video editing ) install which included a card to accept input from a Hi8 source via RCA input. I expect it would be difficult/costly to replace this functionality on a newer system.
Thank you in advance for your thoughtful guidance!
Best thing to do is to disconnect all other devices and boot from a bootable Win setup usb stick. That is how I got it WD Black M2) to work as my C drive in my PC. (W10 pro)
