Today in tales of oh my god I can't believe this exists, I have found a PC that is incompatible with SSDs. Yes, all of them.
And I've gotten Pentium 2 PCs to boot Windows off SSDs on shitty $20 PCI (note the lack of an "e" there) Syba controllers. I mean this
does not work. I've tried six different brands of drives in capacities as small as 64GB and as large as 4TB.
The truth is, this is not something I HAVE to fix. I'm trying to do somebody a favor and it has turned into one of the labors of Hercules, but it does not make sense that it doesn't work.
The HP M7-1015dx is a 17" laptop with a 3rd generation i7 mobile and an internal DVD drive, and for that reason, one of my customer's mom wants to keep it forever. It also has firmware with basically zero user-configurable options beyond the boot order. The old HDD died. Since then I have determined the following:
The internal SATA ports are operating in RAID rather than AHCI mode. What kind of RAID? No idea. HP doesn't list it as needing any additional drivers and Windows 7 and 10 both work so long as they're running off either USB or an internal mechanical drive and they work in either UEFI or BIOS mode. Linux? Same story. I installed Mint. UEFI. BIOS. But still only with works when it's running on mechanical drives or USB. Linux is perfectly happy to run on USB, but Meemaw isn't down for that, so I gotta make Windows work.
Here's the hilarious part: I've downloaded the only available firmware update for this stupid thing on four different systems. Doesn't matter. The firmware update file on HP's web site seems to be corrupt. Thanks HP for being exactly what I always knew you to be. And this is not a Firmware I've ever seen before. InsydeH20? What ever are you? "The most widely used UEFI BIOS in Production"
according to its own web site. Not an Award or AMI in sight.