Laptop: added second hdd in optical bay caddy = system freeze

shwoop

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Mar 25, 2010
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A few months ago I upgraded my acer aspire laptop with an SSD.
I noticed people sold HDD caddies to fit into optical drive spaces in the laptop so opted for a 120Gb SSD as I intended to mount /home on the original plater.
Being cheap and lazy I've been running the SSD in the laptop and the HDD in a USB caddy.
This is working happily but is clearly not the nicest solution as I need to make sure I don't knock out the usb cable when I move the live system around.
Last week I recieved my optical caddy and began assembling it yesterday.

The system posted that it recognised both HDDs but, alas, then froze.
I was neither able to access the BIOS or BOOT menus.
I played around for a little while and can confirm:
a) Both drives work (load or complain about lack of OS) when installed to the laptops HDD bay.
b) The system fails to enter setup when either drive is installed in the caddy (with empty HDD bay).
c) The original optical drive works when installed in the bay.

My initial thought was that the caddy was duff but the fact that it's recognised as the system POSTs made me question this.

Any suggestions would be welcome.
I'm going to get back to the supplier to see if they've come across this before but as I couldn't find this case from a google search I opted to make a public record of the issue (and fingres crossed a solution).

[edit: clealy this is a question rather than discussion but I cannot amend this. Can a mod please make the correction.]
 

Dr_JRE

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Aug 12, 2012
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Check for BIOS updates.

Just because you can see the device info in the POST screen doesn't necessarily guaranty the caddy is working properly.
 

yoshan94

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Sep 12, 2012
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Do your caddy work well in your laptop?

If not, I just share my experience because your problem is similar to my problem before, and now my problem is solved. You can try like I do before:
1. Release your caddy (don't attach your caddy).
2. Go to your BIOS setup and disable your DVD drive (in my laptop: Drive1), and make your primary hard disk (or SSD) as the first boot. Save and turn off your laptop.
3. Attach your caddy with your hard disk.
4. Boot. If you use Windows OS, the OS can detect automatically your hard disk of your caddy. I think that another OS has the same behavior, detect automatically your hard disk.

You don't need to update your BIOS.

For this solution, I think that you cannot use your hard disk of your caddy as the first boot.
 

shwoop

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Mar 25, 2010
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Update time.

Tried your suggestion yoshan but still had the same troubles.

I didn't realise how out of date my bios was as I used to generally keep them up to date.
Anyway, after a lot of hassle installing windows* I managed to update my bios and everything ran smoothly.

If left to my own devices I probably would have RMA'd the caddy before checking the bios so thanks for the confirmation JRE.

Thanks for the help.



*had XP tohand but no drivers. Downloaded 8 but couldn't make an install usb from ubuntu livecd. Installed 8 on virtualbox but not supported by guest additions yet so couldn't access the iso and re-downloading the iso in the vm was causing my wifi to disconnect. Eventually I made a usb in work and the rest was clear sailing. I think I'm going to rustle up a copy of 7 to have installed for any future issues like this.