I have an HP 14-DQ02dx, and would like to add a hard drive.

[Alfred301]

I have an hp 14-DQ02dx, and I would like to add a second hard drive since the drive on the motherboard is only 50gb. I found a ribbon connector for another hard drive. I installed a new drive, and the drive light comes on, but the computer does not see the new drive. The drive is partitioned and shows up when I connect it with a USB. Is there a way to get the computer to see the new drive? The new drive is a 120 GB M.2 connected to a SATA 2 adaptor. 

[Paul_Tikkanen]

I believe in that model series, all the SATA connectors are disabled when there is a 64 GB eMMC drive installed.

[Alfred301]

Thank you for your response. I found a hard drive ribbon connector and attached an SATA III adaptor for an M.2 hard drive. The drive is getting power,  but the computer doesn't see it. Is there any way to enable the SATA port?

[Paul_Tikkanen]

You're very welcome.

Not that I know of.

Hi, @BarryMo67 ;

Do you have any suggestions regarding this?

[BarryMo67]

@Paul_Tikkanen just off the top of my head sadly no,  SATA is a format I have little experience with. Can @Alfred301 take a picture of what he is working with? I read through and detail is a bit light to start my search. Part #'s  would help.

 If I were to just give a quick dirty guess there may be an incompatibility issue????

[BarryMo67]

The only thing I found going by given info was this on Ali

[Alfred301]

[Alfred301]

As you can see, the adaptor is connected to the motherboard by a ribbon cable. The hard drive light is on, and it flashes at startup. The hardware seems to be fine, but I can't get the computer to see it. Not sure why HP would put a port on a motherboard for a SATA hard drive only to have it be non functional.

[BarryMo67 · Accepted solution]

 Ok I am not used to SATA, however everything I see looks as it should. You have power and it blinks as it starts tells me the Motherboard knows something is there. I am guessing here but it may be a driver issue. I am leaning this way as I was in the same boat with my HP Stream when first trying to use an NVME SSD. Streams do not support NVME Natively, so on boot the NVME SSD would not be seen as connected (blocked in BIOS is my guess). Windows 10 Install could see as it has NVME support built in. 

 If I were to test this, I would turn off the Notebook, put a Windows 10 Install Thumb drive into a USB Port, booting to the install (you will cancel out  before you start install), but this will tell if Windows Install sees the drive. As Windows Install shows all available drives that can be installed onto. 

 This screen here of Install 

 If Your Drive shows here then your issue is indeed a driver issue. HP will not have built in support for SATA or NVME.  As to why would HP have Ports/Connectors on a motherboard but not activate them comes down to "Standardized Production", 1 Motherboard can be used for any number of Models of Laptop/Notebook. The lockout of support happens in the BIOS/Firmware, so you then need to sidestep the BIOS with a Boot Manager.

 I can only site my example for you as I have not worked with SATA, I had to sidestep the BIOS with Duet with rEFInd as the Boot Manager preloads the driver to allow for Booting from NVME SSD.

 So if your drive shows in Windows Install, then you will have to find what Boot Manager supports SATA. I would then do a fresh install of Windows to the new drive and format your built-in  eMMC to be used as extra storage. You will need to partition a tiny portion for the new home of your Boot Manager to trick the BIOS in thinking it is indeed booting from the eMMC. The BIOS is also locked to have the eMMC as main boot device.

[Alfred301]

I will definitely give that a try. I would like to boot from the larger hard drive anyway. Apart from the ridiculously small hard drive, of which Windows takes up 75%, it is a nice little machine, and I would like to save it. Thank you for your advice.