Warning Disk Director Users With SSD Drives !
Hi There,
First of all, let me tell you that I have over 15 years of experience in computer service. I'm a certified and qualified IT technician.
Here's my little story, and I hope this will prevent other users to spend a few DAYS like I did to find and fix the same Disk Director issue I experienced when installing Windows 7 on a Solid-Sate-Drive (SSD).
After the hardware installation, I did verified that my BIOS was detecting the drive properly and did set my controller to AHCI mode. After that I booted my computer using my Acronis recovery CD to launch Disk Director 11 Home (Update 2) in order to initialize the SSD drive and create a primary (NTFS) partition. At that point, we're talking business as usual ...
After that, I inserted my Windows 7 DVD and started the installation process ... and that's where the trouble began ... the Windows 7 installation started correctly. I selected the partition where to install Windows, in this case, my SSD drive. The installation continued and all the Windows files were "expanded" as usual.
Then come the first Windows setup reboot ... BOOM ... an error message appeared : "A read error occured, press CTRL-ATL-DELETE to reboot" ... ouch ... what the h*** is going on ?
I spent a few DAYS trying to understand and fix the issue. Basically, it was just impossible to install Windows 7 on my SSD drive ! Believe me, I tried everything you can think of ! Flashing the SSD drive with the latest firmware, trying different controller mode (AHCI, RAID, IDE) ... I tryed different version of disk director (2121) but nothing was working ...
Here's what I discovered ... the only way to make it work, is to select to format the partition (again) from the Windows 7 setup. Even if the partition was already created, formatted and activated by Disk Director, we MUST select to format the drive within the Windows setup or you will always face the error message after the first Windows setup reboot.
This is obviously NOT happening when installing Windows 7 on a standard Hard Disk Drive.
Bottom line is ... something's different (wrong) between Disk Director and the Windows 7 setup program when formatting a Solid-State-Drive (SSD) ... so if you want to install Windows 7 on your SSD, make SURE to format the destination partition from within the Windows 7 setup, even if already formatted by Disk Director, or you will face the same error message.
Disk Director support : this issue can easily be reproduced, could you give it a shot and please fix the issue.
Users : please let me know if you did experience the same issue, and if my post was helpful !
Regards, dlx ;)
Reference :
EVGA P55 LE 123-LF-E653 Motherboard ;
Corsair CSSD-F40GB2-A Sata II SSD (Firmware tested : v2.2 and v2.4) ;
The previous version, Disk Director 10, also had this same issue but it isn't just with SSDs; it also occurs on hard disks. Both Windows 7 and Vista were affected. Windows XP was not.
Personally, I never experienced this issue with any hard disk drive, that's why I took so long to find out why I was having this error message. I immediately suspected the SSD drive, however, the problem was Disk Director. Thanks for your input.
Basically, I don't trust the software to format partitions correctly. I leave that to Windows tools.
Maybe I had too much "confidence" on the Disk Director software ... I agree with you on this one.
dlx ;)
Yes, i had this too but i my case the error was fixed with Update 1 i think (it's a a year ago, in Oct 2010). But i hadn't a SSD but a normal hdd. It had to do with an alignment problem. Disk Director screwed something up with it.
As you did one can use the Win7 Setup DVD and use diskpart in the command prompt - or format the drive in the graphical interface.
Too bad that the error is still present in some particular circumstances...