Bypassing mSATA for Booting a Laptop

I selected Windows 7 and Configuration as the category for this question but it may be a combination hardware and software problem.

A new laptop came with a Solid State mSATA drive and a 5400 rpm hard drive. Intel Smart Response Technology (SRT) was installed to utilize the mSATA as a cache with the mechanical hard drive. It sounds good on paper and does help but I wanted an all SSD solution.

So I replaced the mechanical hard drive with a SSD and completed a new install of Win 7 with the mSATA drive still installed. During the installation process the new SSD was selected as the installation disk. The problem was that the laptop would not boot.

After doing some research someone recommended that the Win 7 install should have been done without the mSATA being present. So I again installed Win 7 on the new SSD. This time the laptop booted sometimes. It would boot two or three time then the fourth time it would report an operating system had to be installed on the hard drive. Sometimes the laptop would boot once correctly and then fail to boot. There was no exact pattern as to when it would and would not boot into Win 7.

The way around the problem was to select the Boot Menu key during startup and then select Notebook Hard Drive as the boot device. This always worked but I'm still trying to find a way round this problem.

Intel SRT requires that the mSATA and hard drive be in a Raid configuration. Unfortunately the laptop's BIOS doesn't have any option to deselect this configuration. I assume this was done intentionally because a mSATA and Intel SRT was installed by default.

So my question is how to eliminate this booting problem. I can certainly reinstall the mSATA, reinstall Win 7 and enable Intel SRT. This would utilize the mSATA as a cache for the SSD which is really unnecessary and may provide slower file access than the SSD alone. This may be the only realistic solution to the problem but perhaps someone else has already faced this problem and developed a solution.

Any help would be appreciated!

Thanks!

Paul