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I have a HDD and an SSD, one regular drive bay and one optical drive bay. I bought a caddy from Amazon to be able to use both drives. At first, my HDD was in the regular HDD bay and the SSD in the caddy. It was very painful but I managed to install Windows on the SSD, and it booted but the installation was messy, so I tried to switch them.

So now, the SSD is in the regular drive bay and the HDD with the caddy is in the optical drive bay. That's when it gets very weird. I could install Windows on the SSD without any issue, but Windows wouldn't boot if the HDD had any sort of filesystem specified (with Windows installed on the SSD!). I deleted the partition table with a Linux live CD, and Windows would boot properly.

The HDD was detected on any Windows utility, but when I tried to assign it a letter or to create a partition table with Diskpart, the utility would just freeze, and then I had to clean the HDD with the live CD to be able to boot on Windows again. I could format the HDD as NTFS without any issue on the live CD, but then Windows wouldn't boot. I then installed Linux Mint on the SSD with a dual boot, and it seems to have the same kind of issue, the partition manager freezes if I try to do anything on the HDD.

I've cleaned the pins and everything. The issue clearly comes from the caddy so the next step in my mind is trying to get another optical bay caddy to check if it does the same thing but I wanted to see if anyone has any other idea that I could check before that?

Thanks.

alphaslow
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    The usual question in the case of an SSD: is the BIOS up to date? Other than that - when you say cleaned the HDD was it full clean like "diskpart clean"? every partition removed? Last: my hdd caddy frequently "dropped connection" - windows would report it disconnected then connected again. – AcePL Mar 16 '17 at 01:03
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    Is this in a laptop (what model?) or deskyop (what model mothrrboard?) – davidgo Mar 16 '17 at 01:07
  • The BIOS isn't up to date, I always avoided to do that because my laptop is from ASUS and they have very weird naming standards for their models. My model is a K551LB, but the BIOS update they offer on its page is actually for the S551LB. Edit: I just checked with HWinfo, that's also what's written for "motherboard model". S551LB. I think I'll try updating the BIOS then. Yes, when I say I cleaned the HDD, it is deleting the partition table. – alphaslow Mar 16 '17 at 01:52
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    look if your caddy has a jumper: https://superuser.com/a/1152438/174557 if yes, change it. this can fix cpu issues, maybe the jumper also fixes your detection issue – magicandre1981 Mar 16 '17 at 16:54

2 Answers2

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One thing to check is the boot order. The one issue you describe appears that the bios/uegi is set to boot hd, then ssd.

Second thing might be to look at the SATA ports the devices are plugged into. They may be different speeds and controllers.

Its not at all apparent to me that the cady is at issue. Very often these things dont even have electronics in them.

davidgo
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  • Only the SSD appears in the boot options. I even cleaned the first sector of the HDD manually to be sure of that. Both SATA ports are 6Gb/s, and they seem to be identical except for the ATA Transport version supported, which is 3.2 for the regular bay and 3.0 for the optical drive bay. – alphaslow Mar 16 '17 at 01:52
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Okay, seems like updating the BIOS did the trick. Thanks to everyone for helping, and AcePL for the idea.

alphaslow
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