Touchsmart TX2 1160ea does not recognise 2nd hard drive in DVD bay unless I install fresh OS.

[HarryMonmouth]

Hi,

I have an interesting issue which has got me pretty much stumped.  I reckon I can fix it by buying a key for windows ultimate 32 bit but as I have a perfectly adequate version of Windows 7 home premium 32 bit for the computer it seems a little wasteful to fork out the cash even for the extra useful features I would gain.

I bought an OCZ agility 3 SSD a couple of weeks back which I intended to put into my DVD bay, using a SATA to PATA adaptor, on the HP Touchsmart TX2 1160 ea and use as a boot device, mainly because I was too lazy to seek out a screwdriver to remove the HDD cover.  When I put it into the DVD bay as far as windows was concerned it did not exist.  Maybe I bought a duff drive I thought so I ended up putting it into the HDDs place anyway.  While it was there I couldn’t boot from the HDD so I installed a copy of ultimate for which I have no spare licence key onto the SSD and discovered the drive worked fine.  Just out of interest to see if maybe the issue was with putting a hard drive into the DVD bay I decided to put the HDD (Seagate Momentus 320GB) into the DVD bay and whilst I could not actually access it I discovered it was present in disc management and I was given the option of formatting it.  Because I still wanted to migrate the home premium OS onto the SSD in place of the unactivated ultimate I chose not to format it but was pleased to find that while my SSD could not be detected in the DVD bay at least my HDD could.

As I now had no way of directly migrating from the HDD to the SSD I replaced the HDD into its original place and put the SSD in a USB to SATA adaptor and migrated the system across that way.

Having done so I put the SSD into its new home where it works fine and I put the HDD into the DVD bay where it had already proven it would be discovered and would work fine, however, it was not.  As far as the computer was now concerned on home premium the HDD did not exist.  As I necessarily had the DVD drive in the bay when installing ultimate it could not have been the presence of the drive at installation that allowed it to be seen.  There is either a setting that was given one value by the stock Vista installation HP had allowed me to originally upgrade from that had an entirely different value in the fresh install or there was a feature of ultimate that allowed it to use the DVD bay to house a second hard drive.

Given the popularity of DVD drive bay adaptors for storage I would assume that in the event that the 1160ea could not use one when running home premium this would be common knowledge as home premium is an incredibly common installation.  I am assuming that the issue is not with unsuitable software or non-functional hardware but rather with an incorrect setting.  Try as I might I cannot get any results.  In bios there is obviously no option for the second drive but this did not stop it appearing with the fresh ultimate install; the DVD drive naturally shows ‘!’ as it is no longer present.  I do not know what was shown when ultimate was installed but as ultimate is independent of bios I cannot see how it could be any different.  The drive does not appear in ‘my computer’, it does not appear in ‘device manager’, it does not appear in ‘computer management’ despite the fact that it was there with the ultimate install, and presumably was also present in device manager at that time.

The HDD is easily accessible by USB but that is not really an ideal solution, especially as it would mean losing the use of two USB ports as well as having the extra bulk of carrying it.  I have tried formatting it with a quick format and I have also tried deleting it but it is just not recognised.

I have wondered whether AHCI might be the issue but as I do not know exactly what AHCI does and have been told it should be altered pre installation paying for the new key to do a reinstall would not be sensible just to alter AHCI anyway, especially considering that apparently a fresh install allows the drive to be detected anyway.  I cannot reinstall the home premium without considerable difficulty either as it would mean first finding a copy of vista and then upgrading with my 7 upgrade.  If you have any ideas for a common sense solution as to how I can gain access to my HDD I would be very grateful.