HP Laptop won't POST with a 1TB SATA SSD attached

[naturalnonsense]

I bought a SATA Samsung 1TB 860 QVO SSD to put into my HP Pavilion 15-cs2008nw laptop, as a secondary drive. The machine does not POST with it attached to the motherboard.

OS: Windows 10 Home x64 0.0.18363 Build 18363

This laptop came pre-installed with a 256GB M.2 NVMe Toshiba SSD, however, in other configurations, 15-cs laptops come with 2.5" HDDs, so there was space for it in my machine too.

With the SATA SSD attached, the display just shows a black screen, with the Caps Lock indicator showing 5 long and 4 short blinks. According to HP's support website, it means that "The embedded controller times out waiting for the BIOS to return from system board initialization (end of POST)."

After two days of trying to fix the issue, I found out the following:

 - It did POST with a 128GB NTFS-formatted Kingston SSD attached to the same SATA port

 - It boots up with the 1TB SSD attached after disconnecting it from the mobo, setting the SATA controller mode to AHCI, instead of "Intel RST Premium with Optane", reconnecting the SATA SSD back, and it even boots into Windows (from the NVMe drive) and can see the SATA drive just fine! And every time, it takes just one restart to make it not boot again. And every time, the SATA controller mode resets back to "Intel RST..."

 - After disconnecting both drives, booting the machine, then connecting only the SATA drive, it does POST, and not only once, and it also even does it with the "Intel RST..." mode.

- The 1TB SSD works just fine in a desktop computer I have, and I NTFS-formatted it.

- The issue is not the SATA-mobo ribbon cable, I tried two of them.

Thanks a lot in advance for your help

[praveen196]

@naturalnonsense Welcome to HP Community!

I understand that HP Laptop won't POST with a 1TB SATA SSD attached.

I have checked the manual (page number 2).

Your product support Dual storage configuration (select products only)

256 GB, PCIe, value, solid-state drive + 1 TB, 5400 rpm, 7.2 mm hard drive

256 GB, SATA, TLC, solid-state drive + 1 TB, 5400 rpm, 7.2 mm hard drive

Please perform the below steps on the computer to run a System Test

- Shut down/Turn off the computer

- Once the computer is completely Shut down/Turned off

- Now press the power button once to turn on the computer and immediately start pressing/tapping the F2 key on the keyboard

- This should open the UEFI Diagnostic screen on the computer

- Please select System Test and then select Extensive Test

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