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I have a Thinkpad T500, it was running Windows 7 Pro. The hard drive (normal 160GB SATA drive, 5400rpm) started making a clicking / chirping sound and things started becoming unstable so I bought a new drive. I went with a Crucial M4 128GB SSD; I figured the price wasn't too bad and it sounded like there were a number of benefits to the SSD.
The hardware install went straightforward - popped the old drive out, put the new drive in. I'm trying to install Windows 7 Pro x64 from scratch and the installer always errors out.
I can boot with the DVD, and initiate the install. The problem seems to be in the "Expanding files..." section of the installer. It will go on for awhile, and then pop up an error message about something failing or being corrupted and to try the install later. It usually happens after the "Expanding..." section gets to 100%. If I reboot and let it bypass the DVD next (since Windows was sort of partially installed?) then I either get something about a corrupted install, or a couple of times I've had a blue screen. And once, early on, it seemed like it finished the initial install but then on the windows bootup it detected an error in the drive and ran chkdisk.
At one point I did get an error during expanding that referenced a corrupted file on the install disc. I wondered if my disc was bad (it was burned from an MSDN iso) so I burned a new copy. That hung on the initial boot, sitting at a black screen for maybe 5-10 mins before getting to the windows installer screen, I set it to continue before going to bed and it ended up the same way.
I downloaded and ran from Lenovo's site a BIOS update and an SSD firmware update utility. The SSD update utility didn't find any needed firmware updates, and the BIOS didn't seem to need updating either.
I guess I'm going to try a new Ubuntu install next and see if that works. I really wanted Win7 as my main install and then I'd use Ubuntu as a virtual guest. I thought I'd just be able to pop in the new drive, install Windows as normal and go from there. Am I missing some other sort of prep work? Could I have a bad drive? Is there such a thing? How would I know? I guess maybe there's the other possibility that the laptop itself is dying or some other component is faulty but I'm not sure what I'd do in that case. Maybe I could grab a cheap new standard laptop drive and see if that worked to rule out something, too.
Is there anything else I should try?
I can't think of anything that you're doing wrong, so there must be a problem elsewhere, FWIW. These Crucial drives have terrible QA so it wouldn't surprise me if there was just something wrong with that one. – Shinrai – 2012-05-04T14:09:06.197
@Shinrai thanks! That's disappointing about the QA - all the reviews I saw listed the M4 as awesome. If I still have problems, esp. if I try Ubuntu and it's still weird I'll probably pick up a cheap HDD and see if the install works there - then send the SDD to get a replacement or something.
One thing I've found this morning is I think there's a newer firmware from Crucial that was just released - I'll try updating that, too. Seems like there's reports similar to mine here and there, too. Sigh... – Peter Tirrell – 2012-05-04T14:32:28.223
This is a shot in the dark...Is your system overclocked? I had trouble with Win 7 failing at about same spot you are and found I had to switch off the overclocking. Install went fine, then turned it back on. – CharlieRB – 2012-05-04T14:38:02.173
@edmicman - Personally I would never use a non-Intel drive for a system drive - the failure rate on all the other mainstream manufacturers is just too high for my tastes. Of course, those are relatively expensive. You're right that grabbing a $40 hard drive for a test is probably a wise idea. – Shinrai – 2012-05-04T14:40:55.143