The hard drive in my wife's laptop (Dell Inspiron 1520) is starting to show its age and recently showed some SMART errors. In an effort to stave off catastrophe, I took advantage of the deal posted last week on the Samsung 840 (250 GB)SSD. Her laptop has a SATA HDD (120 GB) obviously, and the BIOS is the latest greatest for her model.
Now on to the problem:
I used the supplied CD and installed Samsungs data migration software as well as Samsung magician. I slipped the SSD into an external USB to SATA dock and started the 2+ hour data xfer. After the xfer was complete, I rebooted the laptop and checked the contents of the SSD while it was still in the dock. Everything looked good.
I then swapped out the HDD for the SSD and that's when the **** hit the fan. The laptop did not recognize a valid boot drive. I happened to have a copy of gparted on DVD+RW handy, and booted through that. Gparted showed a drive that was 4.38 GB in size. I am presuming its reporting back itself and nothing more.
Any suggestions?