# Why does my Hard Drive say only 8mb?



## Debbie25 (Jul 1, 2011)

I installed a SSD HD into my new Thinkpad SL510.
Install Win7 x64.
No problems
Installed wireless drivers, Hotkey and Ultranav.
Rebooted and the system hung at post
I shut it off and it then said ‘No OS found’
When I slaved the HD to my old system and went into Disk maintenance it only showed the HD as being 8mb.
I could Initialize it but it did not change anything.

Verified that the BIOS had the HD set at AHCI the whole time.

Now I know this is not the HD because it happened on 2 different HD’s.

Have you ever heard of this and know what happened?

Thanks,
Debbie


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## Geoff (Jul 1, 2011)

Did you try formatting the drive when you had it hooked up to your old system?


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## Debbie25 (Jul 1, 2011)

Not yet.
I will try that but I was really concerned as to why this happened to avoid it again.

Thanks


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## Debbie25 (Jul 2, 2011)

OK, so I slaved the HD again and went into Device Management.
It now sees it as having only 7mb.
I right click on it and I'm only able to Convert it to basic or GPT.
Basic is my only option since this HD is not over 2TB.
So I converted it to basic and now the box part that showed it had 7mb is blank and I can't click on that part at all.

I can still right click on the 'Disk 1' part of it.
All it says is:
Disk 1
Basic
7 MB
Online

Any other help out there?

Thanks


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## johnb35 (Jul 2, 2011)

Can you give us a screen shot of the disk management screen?  8mb sounds like your old hard drive, you could never use the full amount of the drive and 8mb was the amount that couldn't be used when you install XP.  If this a new ssd with a fresh install of windows 7 on it, 7 will reserve 100mb for system files.  We need to see the disk management screen.


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## Debbie25 (Jul 2, 2011)

Here is a picture

"Disk 1" is suppose to be a 600GB SSD HD






Thanks,
Debbie


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## johnb35 (Jul 3, 2011)

Question 1

Why do you have a 600gb SSD drive?  Thats not really cost effective there.  Most users don't need more than say a 120 gb SSD drive.  You don't want everything on a SSD drive.  Only your OS and a few programs that you use the most.

It seems your SSD drive is bad.  Your disk management doesn't show any unallocated space.  You may want to run a disk utility on it that will run on ssd drives.  What is the model of drive you have?


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## Debbie25 (Jul 3, 2011)

I have that size of drive because this is a laptop and I can only have 1 HD and as you can see by the picture, I have several partitions and data.

This same exact thing happened to 2 different SSD HDs.
So I wouldn't think it is the HD that is bad.

On both of them I had just installed 2 Thinkpad utilities "Hotkey" to display the volume level when you push the buttons to adjust it. 
And "Ultranav" so I can disable the touchpad and only use the Trackpoint.

You have to reboot to activate these utilities after the install and that's when it crashes.
I scanned both of those install directories for viruses and it found nothing.

I do have another SSD that I can try but I want to know what happened or what is going on before crashing another one.

Is there some partition rule when it comes to SSD?
Because I had created 5 partitions just like my HD is set up now.

The OS install and installing the utilities go flawless until the reboot when I get the "No OS found" and then I find that it is only showing the 8mb.

Thanks


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## Debbie25 (Jul 3, 2011)

To add...
As you can see there is no drive letter given to the HD so I'm not able to run any utility on it like chkdsk, Partition Magic, firmware update or any type of low level formatting.


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## Debbie25 (Jul 3, 2011)

OK, doing some more research on this...

Could someone tell me if this could be the fix.

Make sure the HD is set to AHCI in the BIOS.  THIS I ALREADY DID.
During the install, go to Custom and remove all partitions until there is only the 100mb system partition and the main partition.  THIS I ALREADY DO.... But then have the build install the "INTEL AHCI (ver9) driver".
Then after the build it said to install "Intel RST (ver9 ) driver set" WHICH I THOUGHT WAS ONLY SO YOU CAN SET UP A RAID AFTER A BUILD.


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## Okedokey (Jul 3, 2011)

This is not directly answering your question, but partitions on SSDs are useless as they are flat and the partitions are logical only.  I back up, get rid of the partitions and create folders instead.


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## Debbie25 (Jul 3, 2011)

bigfellla
That is a thought.
From the beginning of my puter days (25 years or so) I have always liked having separate partitions for my different apps and things.

I'm building up the last of my SSD and will try that.
I'm just afraid to install the 2 utilities that COULD have wiped the HD but I don't know how else to get the volume control display or to disable the trackpad without using Thinkpads downloads.  Not sure if there are other apps that will do that, but something to look into.

Thanks, I will post how it is going.


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## Debbie25 (Jul 3, 2011)

OK, so I booted up onto the Windows 7 DVD and saw that the whole 600GB SSD drive was in tacked.

I thought I would just try using 'Casper' and ghost my c: partition over to the other SSD.

It hung before it could get started so I booted up onto my original HD and slaved the SSD.

Well guess what.
It now looked just like the picture above.  Only showing 7mb.

I have no idea what is going on.
For some reason this system totally hate SSD.

Thanks for your help


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## Okedokey (Jul 4, 2011)

Just phyiscally copy across your files and settings, delete all partitions and reinstall.


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## Debbie25 (Jul 4, 2011)

Thing is I can't now because all 3 SSD so no space, only the 7mb and I can't get them back, that I know off.

I even tried running HDDERASE at the DOS level and it failed.
I can see if that happens to 1 drive but 3 of them.


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