TunaDog

That was it! Thank you. The BIOS setting is under "SATA Operation" and the options are "Disabled", "AHCI", and "RAID On". There is no mention of NVMe, but since the goal was to turn off RAID, I changed it to AHCI. I do not know for sure if the boot to Safe Mode was required. I assumed it would be, so proactively used msconfig.exe to configure for safe mode boot along with "Make all settings permanent". Then msconfig.exe after rebooting to turn safe mode off. Two summarize the steps I took in case somebody else stumbles on this: * Used msconfig.exe to enable boot to safe mode * Change BIOS "SATA Operation" from "RAID" to "AHCI" (or whatever "not RAID" is called) * Installed two new drives * Boot. This went into safe mode. No problems. * Used msconfig.exe to disable safe mode * Restart. * Profit.

Thanks Aaron, I'll check that when I get home. I don't know whether it's in RAID or AHCI/NVMe, although if I followed your setup instructions at https://www.nbrchive.net/forum.notebookreview.com/threads/dell-precision-7540-and-7740-owners-thread.830037/page-20#post-10951137 then it's probably in RAID. The "take some steps" post was at first visually daunting, until I read it. 11 steps, 10 of which are "Boot into safe mode". Then don't do anything special in safe mode other than reboot as normal. So presumably merely booting to safe mode should cause the boot process to update/repair itself?

Hi there. I think I used to be TunaDog on NBR, so that's the account name that I set up here. I didn't even know NBR was gone until this morning. A poorly-planned notebook upgrade led me here. I would have planned more, but I knew that if there were any problems I could almost certainly get a quick answer from an expert at NBR. The idea of my upgrade going sideways and potentially having to flatten and re-install a computer to get back where I was...well that wasn't nearly as 😱 as discovering that all the experts were gone. I'm very relieved to find a bunch of familiar names here.

Big thank you to @Aaron44126, @Sandy Bridge et.al. who saved the legacy of NBR. That I only noticed this 18 months after the shutdown is a testament to the fact that the great folks at NBR got me set up with a system that I could just use and forget about the details.

Hi there. My 7740 has been working well enough that I only today learned that notebookreview is gone. What a shame. I am trying to upgrade a 7740 with two additional SSDs and it fails to boot. Any help would be appreciated. I have tried enough things that I believe this scenario is either not supported, or else I need to change something in the BIOS. I'm hoping the latter. The 7740 has been running great (2+years) with a boot drive of WD SN750 2TB, and a second drive that is an old repurposed WD Blue SATA SSD (I think it is before they gave them names beyond "Blue", but the part # is WDS200T2B0B). The intended upgrade was to replace the WD Blue SATA with a pair of Crucial P3 4TB drives. I removed the WD Blue, plugged in the pair of P3 drives, and it does not boot. It goes through the blue boot progress bar, then the spinning dots, then the screen goes black, and a second later it is posting and rebooting. No blue screen, no hang, just endless boot loop. The boot loop eventually ends up _trying_ to enter Automatic Repair (or whatever it's called), but that fails in the same way. Before attempting the upgrade I created a recovery disk and tested it by booting it. With both P3 drives the recovery disk fails to boot as well (same failure: OS loads, then spinning dots, then black screen, then Posting again). I then tested with a single P3 SSD. That boots just fine. With one of them installed in either slot it boots. With the other P3 installed in either slot it boots. I even built new installation media using the latest MediaCreationTool22H2.exe from Microsoft. It fails in the same way when both P3's are installed. So the problem is specifically with the pair of P3 installed. And the fact that the failure even happens with freshly created installation media makes me think it has nothing to do with my current OS configuration. Is there something that I need to fiddle with in the BIOS to make this work?