How to install Windows7 on Hitachi HTS545050a7e380 harddrive?

Question

I have a Samsung NP530U3B with a Hitachi HTS545050a7e380 Harddrive. In the Bios it shows as one drive

Hitachi hts545050a7e380

When I try to install Windows 7 it show 2 drives in the setup

Drive 0 with 15 GB
Drive 1 with 460 GB

Guess it is a hybrid of SSD and normal harddrive, right? I tried to install it on the second drive, but after restarting it goes back into the beginning of the Windows 7 installation. The installation routine automatically activated a 100 MB partition on Drive 0. I guess for the boot manager.

Second try: Installation on the 15GB drive. The same. After reboot it wants to install win7 all over again.

If I remove the USB Stick I get the message "Missing operation system"

Any ideas?

EDIT: Apparently it is not a hybrid, but still shows 2 drives in windows setup.

Answer 1

Ok.

To put the comments together for you...

Your hard drive is not a hybrid... although there is technology designed to be used on hybrid drives, installed and in use on your drive right now. It's called ExpressCache. Samsung includes this with your Ultrabook to speed up booting and program usage. Samsung details this fact on the specs page for your model Ultrabook... as well as having the Windows drivers for ExpressCache featured prominently on the support page for your Ultrabook.

So... what does all that mean? It means you have three choices.

Choice one. Use the Samsung recovery media to put the OS Back on the system that came with the system. It's not a matter of arguing why you wanted to change. It's a matter of the fact that Samsung seems to have gone to great lengths to provide the best experience possible for their hardware... and (This is important) apparently you should REMOVE EXPRESS CACHE FROM WITHIN THE WINDOWS INSTALLATION WHERE IT LIVED before you decide to replace the OS that is using it. So, with Choice one... you recover back to how the Ultrabook was from the factory, THEN remove ExpressCache... THEN install your new OS.

Choice two. Use the utility of your choice to remove any and all trace of ExpressCache from your drive. Just remember, it's not two drives. It's one drive with software and settings to make it LOOK like two drives, because the little one is a cache where stuff got saved for quick retrieval. Low Level Formatting... Parted Magic... whatever you find you can use to make the little partition either go away, or cease to be Disk 0, or not be the primary.

Choice three. This gentleman went through the same hell you are going through. Now, the steps he used for resolution would need to be modified to fit your situation... but I'm going to quote what he put for his solution here. And AGAIN! Blindly following these steps is not going to work. You need to adjust these to fit your situation. For one thing, the "small" drive in his situation was Disk 1, not Disk 0. So, I'd really suggest you read the whole posting I provided a link to, rather than just this quote... but if I don't include the quote, someone's going to be upset about providing an answer without the steps involved (in case the link went dead in the future). Meh.

1. Boot off the Windows DVD or USB installation media
2. Choose the "Repair" option, and the command prompt afterwards (the way to get there is different between Windows 7 and 8)
3. Type in diskpart to get into the partition tool
4. Use the commands list disk and list part to determine which disk is what. For me, Disk 0 was the HDD and Disk 1 was the SSD. The following instructions assume this
5. Select the HDD: sel disk 0
6. Delete all partitions on it: clean
7. Create a 100MB partition for Windows 7 (change to 350MB for Windows 8): create part primary size=100 (or size=350)
8. Format it: format fs=ntfs quick
9. Assign it a letter: assign letter=f (if F: is in use, pick another one. Use list vol to see all volumes and their letters)
10. Create a partition that fills the rest of the disk: create part primary
11. Format it and assign it letter "C", as above
12. Reboot back into the Windows installation media and install Windows into the large partition that was just created
13. Again, reboot into the Windows installation media and go into the repair command prompt
14. Use diskpart's list vol and assign commands to ensure that both the boot partition (F:) and the Windows partition (C:) still have drive letters
15. Select the boot partition (sel part 1) and mark it as active: active
16. Exit diskpart and type in: bcdboot c:\windows /s f:
17. Reboot and you should be good to go!

... Now I've uncovered a few posts out there where other people who decided to put their choice of an OS on (lolz need my Windoze Ultimate 1337 YAY!) who, after removing ExpressCache, wished they had never done this... because apparently you will notice that your Ultrabook is not as fast after you are done, when compared to how it was out of the factory. But, you've got your reasons. At any rate, this info should get you to where you want to be.

Answer 2

I have done this many times. All you need to do is use a USB to install the correct storage controller driver during the install process. then delete all partitions and format. windows will do the rest.

Answer 3

I had a similar problem to this so I thought I'd share how I fixed it. The laptop would boot from my bootable Windows 7 install USB dongle, but when I went to install Windows, it did not detect any hard drives on the machine.

The solution was to go into the BIOS and change "SATA Operation" from "Intel Smart Response Technology" to "ATA". Then, the machine presented the 2 hard drives in the machine to the Windows 7 installer as regular ATA drives, and I could install Windows 7 normally.