Hey all, so I just bought a Intel 520s 240GB SSD two days ago and have been trying to install Windows 8 onto this bloody thing however the situation isn't quite going the way I wanted it. Basically I get the error

"Windows cannot be installed to this disk. This computer's hardware may not support booting to this disk. Ensure that the disk's controller is enabled in the computer's BIOS menu."

and I can't for the life of me figure out why I'm getting that error.

I'm running a ASRock Z68 Extreme4 Gen3 in AHCI mode
The SSD is plugged into the Sata 3 connection along with my other SSD (which shows up)
It does not appear in BIOS yet appears in the install screen for Windows 8 and on my previous version of Windows 7 it appeared/was formatted

It previously stated that it need to be in GBT mode to install windows however that seems to have disappeared now that I'm booting my bootable USB into UEFI mode.

Any help is much appreciated, at my wits end here.

I had a similar problem with my Intel 520s and Windows 8.

Disconnect all other drives except the one you are installing too and the one you are installing from.
When you boot from the install media it should pick up the uefi info from it and you should be able to boot it with the uefi flag.

My flash drive wouldn't allow me to boot from it in uefi mode so I had to make a dvd.

Once its booted into Windows 8 install and you get to the partition screen, just select the disk and hit new.

It should create three partitions, one 'system' one 'msr' and one big one 'primary'.

If it does then it is gpt (I don't think it tells you anywhere that is done properly except the amount of partitions).

Carry on the install, it might say you can not install to 'primary' partition but if you can hit next you're good to go.

Didn't see it not showing up in bios.
Mine does. How are you going to set it as primary boot drive if you can't see it?
Does it show up on the windows partition screen?
Is you bios the latest firmware?

Hmm okay, I'll give that a shot later today then. What is strange though is that it isn't showing up in BIOS however it is definitely there and definitely not DOA. Must be a Windows 8 thing.

i would find out why it isn't showing up in the bios, if it is connected to one of the ports that shows up in the bios, the drive connected to that port should show up.

Didn't see it not showing up in bios. Mine does. How are you going to set it as primary boot drive if you can't see it?Does it show up on the windows partition screen?Is you bios the latest firmware?

It shows up in both the Windows 8 installation screen and when I previously had Windows 7 on before formatting it appeared. I'll have to check what my BIOS is at, but I'm pretty sure it is at current version. It is plugged into the SATA 3 port, as well as my other OCZ 60GB SSD (which does show up in BIOS), so I'm not sure what is going on.

I believe I may have figured out the problem, there seems to be 4x SATA 3 ports on my mobo, however 2 of them are Marvel branded, while the other 2 are Intel branded. Apparently the Marvel ones don't work for OS drives, so I need to plug it into the Intel ones. Will post back results after work.

Heh, well I'm giving WIn 8 a try first to see how radical the changes are, though apparently performance is huge. If that doesn't bode well I've got a Windows 7 Lite version I made that will run supper dooper fast.

I believe I may have figured out the problem, there seems to be 4x SATA 3 ports on my mobo, however 2 of them are Marvel branded, while the other 2 are Intel branded. Apparently the Marvel ones don't work for OS drives, so I need to plug it into the Intel ones. Will post back results after work.

Looks like you beat me to the punch, i would have suggested this right away. The error message gave it away too.

Any offboard controller is often hard to handle. Things like OCZ tools don't work on offboard controllers.

My gigabyte z68 has 2 intel sata2 2 intel sata3 and 2 marvell sata3 slots. so lolsy.

Edit: I don't know what people are talking about about with performance gains. 5 runs of arkham city on both machines for me at the same graphics settings equalled win7 to be winner (by 3fps on average, a performance of about 5% higher on win7).

Anyway, win8 boots faster but SSD vs SSD comes down to literally about 1-2 seconds difference out of 14 seconds max. In fact the biggest problem is because if you enable all the sata controllers into their respective stuff then you end up with the first 8 seconds being just going form bios to controller to controller. Then the difference between one windows and the other is pretty much a 5 vs 7 second boot.

I told you to swap the ports two hours before you figured it out, did it do the trick?

With the fast boot button it takes 2 seconds from pressing the power button to be at Metro/login screen apparently.

http://event.asus.com/mb/windows_8/#feature

There are heaps of little things in Windows 8, like:



If you can't get used to Metro though it doesn't really matter though.

ninite.org
and then right click the 'start' tile at the bottom left of the desktop -> control panel > default programs and set your normal programs as the defaults (so it doesn't jump to metro apps when you don't want to use it).

press winkey + c
press winkey +q
press winkey+i

there are a heap of other things, but that will do for now