XPS L501x + Caddy = Problems

So I just installed a Intel 320 SSD as my main drive + Toshiba 500 GB 7200 RPM HD as my caddy drive and I'm having a major problem.

Basically, I installed Windows just with the SSD installed. Everything worked fine. After all that jazz of getting Windows set up, plugged in the caddy with the hard drive and formatted the drive. No problems so far. Drive was detected and rebooting wasn't an issue. I started installing and moving stuff to my caddy drive. Until, later in the day I had to bring my lappy to work to do a few things. Got to work, turned it on and saw the Dell XPS logo with loading bar and then nothing, black as can be.

Thinking maybe the BIOS had it set where it was booting up the caddy drive I checked and it said for boot priority the SSD was #1 and the caddy was #2. Tried booting again, still nothing but black.

I decided to take the caddy out and just run with the SSD. It started working again. Windows started to load up and everything was fine. So once I got into Windows I tried plugging the caddy back in and I hear the drive turn on and spinning. However, there was no notification that a new drive was detected and when I took a look at Partition Manager and Device Manager its not there.

So yeah, I'm stumped. Solutions I tried so far is installed Intel RST to see if that worked and tried setting the boot priority again. So far no luck. Gonna see if my optical drive works again once I get home. Also, I read somewhere that if you have a 7200 RPM drive in a caddy you need to set a jumper on it for the drive.

If anyone can help me out that would be super special awesome.

 

Update: Reinserted the optical drive. It still works. Docked the hard drive that was in the caddy, works.

Trying to find a jumper for the caddy drive so I can cap the SATA speeds. =(

 

sounds like the caddy is defective. it may be taking down the sata bus.

 

I was wondering if that was the case as well. So I did some testing. I tried out a Western Digital Scorpio Blue WD3200BEVT 320GB 5400 RPM hard drive from my other laptop. That one worked. Restarting wasn't a problem and Windows 7 automatically found the drive.

Well, the caddy works still. Wish I could find a smaller 7200 RPM drive. I guess I'll find a store and buy one to test it out.

 

Such a caddy works fine for me with a Segate 500GB 7,200rpm drive in the optical bay of an L502x. Are all your drivers up to date?
Cheers, Greg.

 

Tried a couple of different 7200 RPM hard drives and nothing worked. Manned up and bought a Western Digital Scorpio Blue 500 GB 5400 RPM drive. Now all is right with the world.

 

its strange it didn't like the 7200 rpm drives. glad you got it figured anyways.

 

Yeah, the weird thing it was working before though. Oh well.