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    L502x boot from Caddy SSD

    Discussion in 'Dell XPS and Studio XPS' started by ericthered03, Mar 31, 2015.

  1. ericthered03

    ericthered03 Notebook Enthusiast

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    Hi,

    How can I boot from my Caddy SSD? I see a bios upgrade for the L502x XPS 15. But would it allow me to boot from the HDD caddy? I currently can not do this.

    How can I boot from the SSD caddy ideas would be appreciated.
     
    ericthered03, Mar 31, 2015
    #1
  2. HumpaLumpa

    HumpaLumpa Notebook Enthusiast

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    With official BIOS and the modded BIOS standard settings it is not possible to boot from caddy/dvd drive SATA port. I also haven't found a setting in the modded BIOS yet.

    But you (maybe) have a good option. Put a bootloader on the first disk (main HDD/SSD slot) which points to the second port (caddy slot) where your OS is. You can then boot like normal from your first hdd. The bootloader/boot menu loads up where you can choose your OS. Your OS can be everywhere on the disks at SATA port 1 or 2, eSATA, USB2.0 or USB3.0 port.
    Windows has it's own bootloader. You can modify it to have multi Windows on different discs. I don't really know if the Windows (8.1) bootloader can boot up a Linux OS. But there are many other Bootloader out there like GRUB or SysLinux. You can also chain-load bootloaders. For instance: Load SysLinux which loads Windows bootloader which loads Windows. Very versatile.
     
    Last edited: Mar 31, 2015
    HumpaLumpa, Mar 31, 2015
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  3. ericthered03

    ericthered03 Notebook Enthusiast

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    Thanks for your great idea. I've read up a little on MBR and GPT. I think that I'll need GPT instead of MBR. There's UEFI (which i see in advanced options in the modded bios) I believe this forms part of GPT. I need to do more reading but the idea is that I want to have more than 4 partitions which is a limitation of MBR. Rather not blow up my laptop. So wondering if I can safely enable EUFI in the advanced options. And do you think this will allow me to boot from caddy which contains +4 partitions.

    My desired setup. Windows 7 on main sata connection and Linux on the caddy sata connection (removable caddy HDD). This way windows can't see Linux when I unplug the removable hdd.
     
    Last edited: Apr 1, 2015
    ericthered03, Mar 31, 2015
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  4. cri-cri

    cri-cri Notebook Consultant

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    MBR is limited to 4 primary partitions but you can have plenty of logical partitions inside extended partitions. It all depends on the setup you have in mind. I have it the other way around, linux on the main drive and windows on the caddy drive and GRUB just maps the drives 0>1, 1>0 before chainloading Win7.
     
    cri-cri, Apr 2, 2015
    #4