If you do this, you may have to pay special attention to the boot order when you enable the other drives, since the 'bay 1' drive is also bootable. (You can just disable the extra drives in the BIOS, you don't have to physically remove them.) I'd recommend doing this in general if your drive configuration is unusual. If you haven't done much work, I'd recommend doing the Windows install over again with only the drive you want Windows on plugged in / enabled, and then adding other drives after the Windows install is done. I don't have time to do it today but in the next few days I should.Ĭlick to expand.This may well have happened, Windows likes to put the boot partition on the 'first' hard drive. My plan is to replace both of these drives with two completely different drives to see is the machine will still boot. Is there a possibility that windows put a system partition on one of the other disks while still placing the main installįurthermore can this system boot with only the mSATA drive now that windows is installed (unlikely I think).

When I go into disk management it shows a 100MB partition on the drive in Bay 1. The machine booted as normal recognised the windows CD and the install was painless. I set the Optical drive as the first boot device and the minicard SSD device as the second and rebooted. I booted up and was able to enter the bios (yay!). I installed drives into each available bay which resulted in this config. At first I tried it with the mSATA drive in the FCM with no other drives installed.

Dell m6500