Had a call from Intel this morning, and a long conversation.

We concluded that there's probably an incompatibility between the MoBo BIOS and SSDs in general. He was interested that the "power delay" would make it work, and suspects there's a toggle to do that somewhere in the MoBo BIOS (but doesn't know, and they aren't allowed to contact them to find out).

I'll have a sniff around in the BIOS, then do my thing with the soldering iron.

Getting the "Drive C" off the existing partitioned hard drive onto the SSD and getting it to boot could be "interesting". His advice was to move all the other partitions to a different HDD, then clear the present boot drive down to less than 120GB, then use the Intel migration tool.

A bit of a pain, but may work. I'll probably try the EASEUS/EasyBCD thing first since it's a lot easier.

Well, it's sorted!

Today, having a couple of spare hours, I got out my soldering iron and built a little thingy to go in the power lead. It delays the power to the SSD for 1 second at switch-on.

With that in circuit, the SSD shows every time at boot-up. I eventually got brave and migrated drive C from the hard drive to the SSD.

Wow! Aren't SSDs fast! Boot-up takes a few seconds rather than a few minutes, and most of that seems to be waking up the other hard drives.

So if your SSD doesn't accle, try connecting the power to it a few seconds after the PC starts. If that makes it work, build yourself one of these:

http://jillings.org.uk/ssd_delay.jpg

Pah!

Too complicated. I'd have made the power open a water valve and fill a tin, releasing a ball bearing that hits a micro-switch.


Seriously, very intuitive thinking, finding that delay.