I have been trying to install Windows 7 Ultimate on an SSD I have and am having difficulties after the install. The SSD is a 100 GB Samsung 'mccoe1hg5mxp-0vbd3' or also named 'SS805'. This SSD was introduced in 2009. I believe that it was first installed in a server but now I have it in a desktop (as listed). I think that this drive is good because I placed it in another system as a test as a secondary drive just for data and it showed up fine. I could read/write files with no problem.

Issue: I am able to install from the Windows DVD with no errors until after it is done copying & expanding files and the PC reboots. It states "A disk read error occurred. press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart". I did the install again with the drive partitioned and formatted properly and had the same issue. Also, to note, I have no other devices,cards,memory,misc. installed in this system. It still has the same components in it as when it was first purchased.

In the Bios for the SSD it is set on configuration 'Enhanced' and the mode to 'IDE'. I also tried 'Compatible' but had the same issues. I tried 'AHCI' as well and ran into the same problem. From research I found that if it is set to 'AHCI', I should not have to load any drivers for the drive during the install. I have also tried searching for the driver for this SSD on Samsung's site and had no luck as no models were listed under 'SS805'. Nor could I find any on the net. If I could find the most updated driver, then I would use it for the install while in the 'IDE' mode. I also flashed my bios to the latest firmware but have the same problem. I have read through the forums and saw that sometimes there can be alignment issues with solid state drives but I also read that the Windows7 installer is supposed to do the alignment for you.

As a test to see if it would work, I was able to install WinXP 64-bit with no problems at all on the SSD. I then ran the install for Windows 7 while booted into WinXP and this time after copying & expanding files, the pc booted with no disk read error at all. I thought all was good until the setup got to the last step where it says 'Completing Installation' and then it gave error “Windows Setup could not configure Windows on this computer's hardware”. I am now 'back to square one'.

Please forgive me if the fix for this is listed in another thread. I mostly see tips for tweaking but not too much listed for install issues. I searched quite a bit and decided to create a new thread because I have a totally different model SSD.

Thanks in advance for your advice.
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Asus Essentio CG5275-AR003
Intel Core i5 650 / 3.2 GHz
8-core, 64-bit
Chipset type: Intel H55 Express, 1333.0 MHz data bus speed
L2 cache
8.0 GB DDR3 SDRAM @ 1333.0 MHz
Storage Controller: 1.0 x Serial ATA - Integrated, Serial ATA-300
Power supply: 400.0 Watt
American Megatrends Bios v.0502 (AMIBIOS)

FYI, this is not a Windows 7 support forum. Since the SSD appears to work OK installing WinXP, according to your posting, then some kind of incompatibility with Win7 behaviour seems possible.

I see that you've posted exactly the same question on several other forums, which seem more suitable than this specialist data recovery forum (and you're not trying to do data recovery):

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/276 ... ot-install
http://forums.cnet.com/7723-7591_102-547510.html
http://www.techsupportforum.com/forums/ ... 13014.html
http://forums.techguy.org/hardware/1027 ... after.html

So I wish you luck with your search, but I don't want to duplicate effort with all those other people, by getting too deep into this

Just FYI, Dell have released a f/w update to this drive, as sold in their systems. I didn't see any info about it causing a Win 7 "disk read error" message, but I saw mention of a rare data corruption isue, where the wear leveling process was buggy, resulting in the wrong data sometimes being read back afterwards.

If I was in your situation then one of several areas for further investigation would be to try to get more info out of Win7 than just "disk read error" (e.g. did it log anything to its event log? Does Win7 have any functionality to provide more info about that error?) so that you can see if there is always something common about the exact type of error, or location (LBA) of the error.

Of course trying to install Win7 on your SSD, but with that SSD is fitted into other PCs, would help to eliminate something about your system as being the cause. Similarly, installing Win7 on different SATA storage (HDD or SSD) in your system, would help to show that your system is able to have Win7 installed successfully. Interpreting such test results is not always as easy as it may first appear, but this is unrelated to data recovery so is off-topic here.

Good luck!

Ok, thank you for the advice