Added 2nd HDD, laptop won't boot

[ausjmc10]

Hi all,

I have an Acer Aspire 5560G. It came with a 750Gb HDD and a Blu-Ray drive. I wasn't using the optical drive, so decided to put in a 60Gb SSD as the boot drive, use the other drive as storage, and put the Blu-Ray into an enclosure for external use. I bought a Silverstone TS06 for this, which included the optical drive enclosure as well as a caddy to install the HDD in the optical drive slot.

The SSD has installed fine, and the computer is working well. However, when the other HDD is attached, it won't boot. It sits with a blank screen (not even the backlight), doesn't beep or reach POST, and after it's been on for about 2 seconds, the HD activity light comes on and stays on... so it's trying to read something, but I don't know what.

The second drive has been formatted, completely erased using DBAN and then formatted again. If I connect it once Windows is running, it reads the drive with no problems at all, and everything's happy. If I attempt to restart, though, the same thing happens.

I consider myself a capable computer user, but in no way a technician/expert, and I'm completely stuck for ideas. Can anyone help out here? Would be greatly appreciated.

 

[ausjmc10]

Bump. Any ideas?

To save time, should add that the SSD is boot priority 1 when the other drive isn't attached, and I can't access BIOS setup when I boot with both attached.

 

[FALC0N]

Could possibly be a bios issue of some sort. Especially since you can't access the bios when both are connected. Any jumper settings on either drive? What about reversing the setup. Boot from the HDD and using the SSD as a slave. Does that work?

 

[ausjmc10]

I don't believe there are any jumpers on the SSD. There are 4 jumper pins on the HDD. I don't understand jumpers well; my understanding was they made no difference on SATA connections? What do you suggest I try?

Reversing the setup doesn't make any sense, as I lose the speed benefits of SSD by booting from the HDD...

Thanks for the help.

 

[ausjmc10]

One final bump... really don't have any clues here.

Falcon, did you have any suggestions about how I could change jumper settings for a different result?

 

[FALC0N]

Well, reverse the drives. See if it does the same thing. Obviously, you would keep it like that, but it will tell us something. You could also try it on a different system, if you have one. See if it's a problem follows the drives.

Bust first, flash the bios, if you haven't already. Maybe it's a bios bug.

 

[ausjmc10]

Ah, I get what you mean. Sorry, didn't think of it like that. I switched it up, and found that when either drive was connected in the main HDD bay, it was fine (either booted, or told me the OS wasn't found), but when either was attached in the caddy, the problem occurred.

Managed to find posts from several other people having similar issues with Acer notebooks, and every one that solved it had done so by flashing BIOS. Unfortunately, this didn't work for me... I found one site that suggested needing a minimum BIOS version of 1.16 to solve the issue, and as fate would have it, the most recent version for this model is 1.15.

Called tech support just to check, but no dice... they couldn't offer anything more.

So the final answer seems to be that an Acer Aspire 5560G can't support a second hard drive. Not what I wanted to find out at this point.

Thanks FALCON for your help.

 

[Nicholas Lanza]

I know this is an old thread, but since I have this exact model/problem I thought I comment for other people searching for a solution to this. I CANNOT boot the laptop with the HDD caddy installed in the cdrom drive bay. However, after updating the UEFI (bios) to 1.15 I CAN install the caddy AFTER booting, use the disk on the fly, and it all works. It's a pity acer will probably never resolve this since it's sort of unsupported and they've moved on to newer models. But despite this, I love this laptop, and use it like a mobile hyper-v lab.