Problem installing OS on a SSD mounted into the optical drive bay (caddy)

[Vio_Gh]

Hello!

Firstly "Happy New Year!"

I have  a 470 G0, a very thrusty old friend. More exactly this version: H6Q21EA#ABB

I've deciced to make it more up to date and last year I had on it 16GB from 8GB. All went great. Now I wand to put into the picture an SSD...

The problem: 

In the optical drive are I've put a caddy and in it a SSD Samsung 850 EVO 250GB drive. In Win 8.1 x64 the SSD has been discovered and intialised as GPT.

The weird thing is that in BIOS I cannot see the SSD in legacy mode or UEFI.

I want to install Win on the SSD, that it is mounted in the caddy and to leave the HDD in its place (better shock protection), but there's no way to make the SSD as boot device.

Same thing on the latest BIOS F66, if I remember corectly!

Any hints?

Cheers,

Vio

[Huffer]

Putting an SSD in an optical caddy is not the solution sorry to say. First of all, the port where the DVD drive connected is a slower version of SATA so you lose the speed of the SSD you paid to have. Secondly, as you are discovering, the laptop will not boot from such a drive nor can you install an OS on it. Shock protection or not (which is a valid concern by the way) the only way to do this right is to swap the position of the SSD and the primary hard drive. 

If you have upgraded the memory then you have seen the inside and know where the hard drive is located. Post back with any more questions and please Accept as Solution if this is the answer you needed even if it is not the answer you wanted. 

[Vio_Gh]

Thank you, Huffer!

I've seen some caddy problems, that are solved by desoldering a pin on the caddy's connector. I'll try this first.

BTW, the SATA cable of the ODD can be changed with something better?

Cheers!

[Huffer]

You are just ignoring my point. The optical drive port on the motherboard is slower than the main SATA port. There is no workaround. 

[Vio_Gh]

Sorry Huffer!

I'm not ignoring your opinion, I'm just seeing the half full of the glass 🙂

At CrystalMark Benckmark and AS SSD the results are roughly similar with what I've seen on other users. I have't yet tested the SSD in the main SATA port.

I'm not too used to laptops, sometimes they are more picky than desktops and some normal things became ordeals in the lapto world.

All the best!

[Username_Omen]

So your bios wont detect it because BIOS cannot by nature boot from GPT partitiioned drives. they can only boot from MBR drives. It must be a master boot record table type to be able to boot from. UEFI can boot from GPT or MBR.

[Vio_Gh · Accepted solution]

Hello guys!

Thank you for all your replies first of all! I've solved the problem , pretty close to my wishes.

Short tutorial: Problem: Multiboot OS, one OS on the old HDD and one OS on the new SSD mounted into the optical disk bay

1. Old HDD in its bay and the SSD into a caddy in the ODD bay

2. In BIOS at SYSTEM CONFIGURATION / BOOT OPTIONS - DEselect: FASTBOOT and CUSTOMISED BOOT - Select: UEFI Hybrid with CSM

3. Use a bootable stick with desired OS for the SSD

4. Install the OS on SSD (it seems that the SSD it has to be initialised in MBR style not GPT (thanks Username_Omen)

5. Enjoy!

Observations: the boot manager will be installed on the HDD, so the new operationg system has to have the HDD always mounted. I guess it will not be this a problem usually. It would of been best to have two completly independent OSs 🙂

Some side quest, that I've also tried is to chech the SSD behaviour. And it seems that in my laptop fortunatelly the caddy does not diminish the strenghts of the SDD. I'm not saying that is the situation of all HP laptops, but in this case the second port is similar with the primary SATA port.

The results in left picture is obtained with the SSD mounted in the bay area and HDD in its bay. 

The right picture is only with the SSd mounted into the HDD bay.

In both situations the tests were made in a fresh install of Win 8 Enterprise x64

All the best,

Vio

[Huffer]

This is a workaround. You are not really booting from the SSD in the optical bay you are booting from the hard drive in the main bay. And this is way too complicated for most peope to implement.I would be curious to see a Sandra report on whether the optical bay port is SATA III or some lower version of SATA. But I will admit the read and write speeds on the SSD in the optical bay are higher than I thought they would be. 

[Vio_Gh]

@Huffer

Yes, indeed for unknown reason the SSD is not bootable if it's put into the optical disk bay. That's unfortunate. It's weird, because in a normal desktop thisissue never occur. Guess, that normal things on a platform have to be messsed up on others  🙂

I guess is a BIOS problem. It should not be that hard to correct.

The solution I've found, is not that hard to implement. Is the easiest if you want to have a second OS and just to put the SSD into the caddy. What I wanted it was two independent operating systems, like I always had to have and to change the boot sequence in the BIOS, but the BIOS didn't comply.

Thanks for the Sandra hint. I've just find out that my HDD is a SATA300 not 600 🙂 Look at the screenshots