N56VZ fails to sleep shutdown

Wondering if anyone else has seen this and knows how to sort it out, I've spent a day so far and checked forums/google but to no avail...

I've moved the old slow HD to cdrom in a drive caddy and completed a fresh install of Windows 7 on the SSD (UPgraded from Windows 8) in the old hard drive position.
The problem I've found is with the old drive fitted in the caddy, the laptop fails to shutdown properly, just sitting on the Shutting Down spinny thing screen forever.
Similarly with putting the laptop into sleep, it never goes into sleep (power light stays on) and therefore never wakes up after.

I've updated to latest BIOS and running the latest drivers from Asus. Both drives are MBR partitions. If I take out the 2nd drive, everything is OK again so definitely the cause of the problem.

So, anyone else had this or am I just 'lucky'?

 

There's no technical reason, or any bios-settings that should cause it (..or, there are no differences between the two sata ports). And because of the way sata ports are made now, you can probably rule out that some sort of lack of pins on the dock, and so on, could disable some of the functions.

So most likely... a partition of some sort on the other disk that's mounted at boot by the admin-account..? Something marked as system, and that won't be unmounted with the user-level calls used on the hibernation cycle?

 

Thanks, I'll take another look at it tomorrow and see if it has the same issue with the drive set as inactive. The drive was just repartitioned as a single 1Tb ntfs partition and I reset the partition table so very strange that Windows would have a problem with it, but hey, good old windows.

 

Could be you need admin rights to "sleep" it just because it's been marked as a boot drive as well.

I am guessing, though - could absolutely be something else. But I've seen that happen before.

Other probable things.. Some service running an index on the drive. I really have no idea how to figure out a way to find out which service it could be, though. Like you said: Windows. Pretty much all windows computers have some device or other that actually reports it's trying to stop the computer from suspending -- but actually don't, because they're tagged for some sort of timeout. It's extremely frustrating trying to figure it out.

 

I too have the same problem. is the chip of the caddy not to be compatible with the port sata of N56VZ. Many have used this: http://www.raidsonic.de/en/products/details.php?we_objectID=8030
and everything works fine.

 

Thanks, probably serves me right for being cheap.
I was using this one: EiioX SATA 2nd 2.5'' Hard Drive Caddy for 12.7mm: Amazon.co.uk: Electronics
Let me know if you get the Raidsonic one and have any success - I'm going to hold off for now as my N56's being RMA'd as it doesn't even turn on now.

 

A day should reach me on Raidsonic. Just installed write my impressions. We hope.

 

I found the solution in this post: http://forum.notebookreview.com/hp-business-class-notebooks/655065-hp-elitebook-8560p-wont-shutdown.html
I made ​​the change as shown in the picture and now it works perfectly.:thumbsup:

 

Nice. That didn't occur to me at all

So.. any guesses about how this hangs together? The actual caddy has "presence" on the system, whether a disc-drive is connected or not? So the command to the hdd is completed, but the "port" is still active.. something like that?

 

Wow, good find (and very interesting fix)! Thanks for the update, OP. :thumbsup:

 

Oh hey. I got my laptop back from RMA (7 day turn around for dead motherboard, not bad at all) and was going to attempt to hack the connectors in my drive caddy.
Turns out I didn't need to, it had an undocumented feature of a tiny switch at the back of the caddy which must disconnect the diagnostic pin from ground - and now my problem with sleep / shutdown is fixed!
Thanks all for the comments, great help - for any future cases it's worth mentioning the teeny-tiny switch if people have similar caddies.


Apologies for the crap photo, but you can see where I mean.

 

Hello, I'm glad you solved all your problems. Now is my ASUS on RMA, unfortunately the screen is turned off and you can not do anything. Not bad for a new pc with a week of life.

 

Interestingly enough, that's exactly what happened to mine.

 

Hand is returned in 5 working days. Super fast. Replaced the motherboard. I confirm that Raidsonic IB-AC642 works without any modification. I noticed that the LED on the Caddy has different behaviors depending on the type /model of hdd that is mounted.

 

This one has the switch as well I think:
Amazon.com: Universal Sata 12.7mm 2nd Hard Driver Aluminum LED Caddy for Optical Drive Bay: Computers & Accessories

 

i dont get it. so what do you do with the switch? i hv the exact same caddy