Lenovo Y500 SSD startup issues

[Grapes1234]

Hello,

I recently bought a Lenovo Y500 (i5 no cache SSD version).

I quickly replaced the standard HDD it came with and swapped it with an SSD (OCZ Vertex 4) and installed W7.

Ever since I made the swap, the only way I can get it to boot is if I press the recovery button on the side, hit load bios, then exit without saving.

And viola, without changing one thing the computer boots fine. Loading up the bios and doing nothing seems to change something but I have no idea what.

Other info:

When I load the bios and exit to boot the computer, I see there is no drive detected at all.

AHCI Mode

Pressing the standard power button try's to have my nic card search for something to boot to.

Computer works fine in all other aspects.

So yeah, if anyone could tell me how to get my computer to boot normally without needing to enter/exit the bios every time that would be awesome.

[code_theory]

I'm not understanding how these two things are simultaneously possible:

Ever since I made the swap, the only way I can get it to boot is if I press the recovery button on the side, hit load bios, then exit without saving.

And viola, without changing one thing the computer boots fine. Loading up the bios and doing nothing seems to change something but I have no idea what.

... and...

When I load the bios and exit to boot the computer, I see there is no drive detected at all.

AHCI Mode

Pressing the standard power button try's to have my nic card search for something to boot to.

My interpretation of the first quote is that entering the UEFI BIOS setup, then exiting without doing anything, allows the computer to boot from the new SSD drive. But my interpretation of the second quote is that entering the UEFI BIOS setup, then exiting without doing anything, leaves the computer not detecting the SSD drive. It boots from a drive it isn't detecting...??? What's your reasoning for saying it isn't detected?

My only guess here is that, perhaps (very, very "perhaps"), you've partitioned your SSD drive with an old style MBR partition table from the good old pre-EFI days. EFI likes gpt partitioned disks; also, the one-key recovery -- to my knowledge, at least -- does nothing but change the BOOTNEXT nvram value to the Lenovo recovery partition and then boot that partition immediately. If that partition is intact or even if it isn't the Lenovo recovery partition but is still bootable anyway, that could be causing unexpected behavior.

Pressing the usual power button would just boot the first default from the list found in the (EFI) BIOS setup, which will display different behavior. I'm guessing that the BOOTNEXT value isn't getting properly cleared when you exit the BIOS, since the machine didn't actually boot anything? Maybe?

This is all correct to the best of my knowledge, but don't take it as written in stone: I don't work for Lenovo or anything, I just own a Y500 and happened to trash the disk which left me needing to figure some of this stuff out. This may not be of much help, but since nobody else had anything for you, there it is.