SSD caddy adapter for CD-ROM bay - HP6715b

[roses2fr]

Does anyone have any experience of swapping their CD-ROM drive for a SATA-enabled SSD/HDD caddy adapter to provide themselves with extra disk storage?

Can you tell me where you purchased it from and if you had any issues installing it/setting it up on a HP6715b laptop?

Specifically, can you tell me what BIOS version you have and which Windows OS version you are using please?

(To elaborate, I bought such an adapter, for which the eBay description said it was for the HP6715b. But I now suspect that only means its physical size is compatible with the CD-ROM drive bay. It appears they haven't actually tested it on this particular machine - although thinking about, it would be impossible for a the manufacturer to actually do this.

I now have a feeling that my current BIOS version (F07) is inadequate to communicate with the caddy (although my CD-ROM drive works without issue). So I need to update the BIOS to F20 but this is proving more difficult than it should be. See my other post elsewhere on this site where I am requesting an ISO disk image to do the update.)

Thx.

[Huffer]

Your laptop is of the age when SATA was a new thing and from what I am seeing the optical (DVD) drive actually works off of an IDE interface not a SATA interface. I would be interested to see a picture of the connector to the motherboard of both the laptop DVD drive and then the hard drive caddy you bought for the optical bay. I sincerely doubt its the BIOS that is your limitation although it would be a good idea to flash to the latest as a general principle. If I recall correctly, however, the BIOS flash using the Windows based app has to be done from a Vista environment. Trying to do it from Windows 7 and newer runs the risk of bricking the machine. 

[roses2fr]

Yes, I see what you're saying about the optical drive being an IDE interface. But the caddy should incorporate an internal SATA-IDE adapter. 

When I told the eBay supplier that it wasn't working, one of the first things they said was make sure the BIOS is up to date (as if they've experienced the same issues of non-functionality with their caddies in other laptops. They're sending me a replacement FOC - will see if that has the same prob). But as you can see from my other post on this board (different section), I'm having diffculties upgrading the BIOS. I have the relevant SoftPaq SP55556 whcih should work from within Windows, but doesn't - not XP, not Vista, nor from DOS. And yes, I've heard that rumour about the possibility of bricking the laptop if done from within Win 7. But as long as the update is successful from outside of Win 7, a Win 7 drive should still boot up and work, right?

Enclosed are poor quality photos of the caddy and orginal CD-ROM connectors. They both look identical to me. Can't get the motherboard one, no intention of pulling my latop to pieces for that.

Thanks for your feedback, but I think I'll wait to see if I get an answer from someone who's actually done this upgrade on their 6715b or even another 67xx series machine.

caddyoriginal CD-ROM drive.

[Huffer]

 Sorry I am not rushing to assure you all is well and its going to work  out just fine so you should just keep waiting for such a response for a while I guess. You are not likely to find anyone else who has been around long enough to know anything about this but when you have waited what you feel is an appropriate period of time come back if you wish.

Keep in mind an IDE to SATA "adapter" just adapts the pin-out. There is no way to create a true AHCI interface on a motherboard that does not have such an interface. If I recall correctly and I am pretty sure I do, that model laptop and others from the same era with AMD CPUs had SATA hard drive interfaces but it was emulated SATA....therefore you could install Windows XP onto them with no special F6 driver to enable the SATA system since it was not a true native SATA system. You might have better luck with an adapter that has an IDE connection inside the caddy for an IDE drive. There are IDE solid state drives but not common and the performance is not impressive. 

Good luck. 

[roses2fr]

No apologies necessary. And I hope you didn't take offence either at what I said. It's just that I'd rather find someone who did this hardware upgrade. But agreed, that might take some time...hope springs eternal.

The old HDD I dug up with XP Pro on it is indeed a SATA drive but I installed it so long ago (and so many other OS installations in between) that I can't remember if I did the F6 thing or not. It's possible I used a slipstreamed disc with SATA driver incorporated in the setup.

But "emulated SATA"? You got me there, never heard of it, but I take your word on it as you're obviously much more knowledgeable about these things than I.

Good idea about the caddy with an IDE connection (haven't actually seen them on the market, so not sure if they exist), but that's not going to be a solution in my case (no dosh to buy a big capacity IDE HDD anyway).

My situation is: current drive with Win 7 Ult 32-bit is a 1TB HDD, but it's nearly full of data and very slow at booting. My idea was to get a 240GB SSD  which I would install into the main drive bay with Win 7 64-bit (which I need for my music software) and install all my Program Files to. And then put the HDD in the caddy so that the main drive can access all its data. But if the replacement caddy doesn't work, I'm back to square one.

The SSD currently has a temp set up of Vista 64-bit which is how I established SP55556 doesn't work in that OS.

So I'm snookered until I can find a way to update the BIOS to ascertain if that is the problem or not.

Cheers!!

[Huffer]

Yeah I see where its a problem. But I always find it kind of fun to try to make old hardware work in the modern world. I am a vintage laptop collector/trader in addition to my day job so have to deal with all eras of hardware going back to 286 laptops from the '80's. 

I just took a look on eBay and nobody seems to be selling a pure PATA/IDE optical to hard drive adapter these days. Likely not much market as PATA hard drives in large capacity are so hard to get. I do have a couple such devices originally designed for Pentium II era IBM Thinkpads but they have proprietary connectors. 

I suspect you may not find someone who has done what you want to do because it cannot be done. Good luck. 

[roses2fr]

But where you could perhaps shine your light of wisdom is by taking a look at my other post "Disk image needed for BIOS update HP6715b" in another category in this forum.

Do you have any experience of flashing BIOSs? Can you explain why the SP55556 readme documentation says it's for updating from within Windows (but doesn't actually specify *which* OS, which is a bit naughty of HP) - but when invoked returns an error message?

How would I take the ROM cabinet file (packed or unpacked?) for RevF20 and put it on a bootable USB flash drive and run the update from DOS? (Which DOS - FreeDOS or MS-DOS 6.1?) What other files do I need to make HPQFlash.exe work?

Becasue surely running it from a DOS prompt is the safest way to go to prevent any issues with the process freezing midway through? (That's how I've always done it with BIOSs on desktop PC mainboards anyway...)

[roses2fr]

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@Huffer wrote:

 I just took a look on eBay and nobody seems to be selling a pure PATA/IDE optical to hard drive adapter these days.

Sort of had a feeling that might be the case.

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@Huffer wrote:

I suspect you may not find someone who has done what you want to do because it cannot be done. Good luck. 

Ditto. I admit my original post is a bit of a shot in the dark. But that's sometimes the beauty of these forums - you might find somebody who has already crossed the bridge into the unknown ahead of you.

By the way, have you ever personally fitted and used one of these SATA adapter caddy trays into ANY kind of laptop, HP or otherwise??

Thx for your help Huffer.

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[Huffer]

The easier way to do this is with a usb floppy disk, but if you can make a DOS bootable USB disk that will work, too. If you go to the download page there is a recent windows based executable BIOS flash which, as you say is not working for you. There is also a DOS-based BIOS flash tool there but it only has the .bin file for older BIOS. I would make the DOS bootable floppy and then substitute the .bin file found in the newest file for the older .bin on the floppy disk. I was able to extract out the F.20 .bin file from the executable using 7-zip. The DOS flash program will ask you to point to a .bin file and it should flash with the newer one as easily as with the older one. 

[roses2fr]

Please look for my answer in the other thread "Disk image needed for BIOS update HP6715b"

Thought it appropriate to move the discussion there.