All of the Internet and I cannot find and answer to why HDD bay #2 won't work after fresh OS install?

Did you ever figure this out? I took a DV9308NR that was in perfect condition externally, sent the mobo out and had a 2012 NVIDIA GPU put it in, along with a TK60 2.0 CPU, a modded heatsink and BIOS set up that keeps it running at its hottest at 135"F. The only reason I spent the $85 on having the mobo done was because it has a huge 17" screen, has HDMI output, 7 USB ports including the 3 USB 3.0 ports from the 54mm expansion card I installed for $12.00 and THE TWO HARD DRIVE BAYS! I put a 64GB Kingston solid state hard drive in bay #1 along with 4GB of ram running WIndows 7 Pro 64 bit and this laptop flies!! So when I go to put the 500GB WD 7200 rpm HDD in bay #2 to make it the HDD to save everything to, everytime I put any hard drive in the #2nd bay and turn on the laptop it posts, then freezes. Sometimes it won't even post. I cannot find anyone on Google with the directions on what to do. I read that that the AMD boards only recognize 160GB hdd, tried one of those, same thing happens. Nobody can give me an answer. I would appreciate it if someone knew how to fix this.

 

You say, POST then freeze... define freeze. Or does it just sit at a command prompt like it doesn't know which drive to boot from?

 

Sometimes it brings up the HP logo screen and then just locks up and sometimes when it's turned on it doesn't even make it to the LOGO screen. Sucks

 

I'm going to say it's your modded BIOS then. Have you tried flashing the OEM BIOS to see if you're still having this issue?

And be careful with the BIOS swapping. Doesn't take but one bad flash.

 

Does it freeze with the 2nd HDD removed? Could be a bad SATA port causing the lock up.

 

The BIOS hasn't been modified. The DST was changed to trick the fan to turn on at a higher speed and run longer at a different temperature. I guess if that means modded maybe it has. But modded BIOS to me always meant turning on options that you couldn't get to before or options that are greyed out before.

It does have the original BIOS and another problem I've had is that there is only ONE version of BIOS I've ever seen for this model notebook. Isn't that crazy? Not one single BIOS update. If you go to HP's page for this notebook and look under the BIOS driver, it's just a copy of the original version that's there in case you need it for flashing.

I really really disklike messing with the BIOS on any laptop because about a month ago I was updating the BIOS on a Gateway NV51B109U that was less than a year old. I had just refurbished this laptop replacing a speaker, keyboard, cracked LCD screen, burnt out USB hub (well the USB ports were mashed in from an idiot), changing ram from 4gb DDR3 to 8gb DDR3, and replacing the OEM 5400rpm 320GB HDD with a 120GB Kingston solid state hard drive. I was able to score this laptop for free for doing a repair on another laptop for someone and including the sshd I only had $125 in parts!! Got a huge deal on everything! Once it was altogether and running like greased lightning booting from ice cold to desktop in 11 seconds I was going through and making sure there were no other updates I could make before I sold it.

I decided to update the BIOS since the original BIOS had 17 updates to it! Yes, 17 and each version fixed another small problem. So I decided to update in case of one of the many tweaks before I sold it. During the BIOS update I didn't have the battery inserted. Why wreck a perfectly good battery? I was about to find out why and out of nowhere about 30% of the way into the BIOS update, someone hit a telephone pole down the street from me because of the ice on the roads, knocked out my power, and poof the laptop shut off before the BIOS was done....

After trying 100's of different methods to flash the BIOS over 2 weeks I called Gateway. The laptop was 12 months 6 days old and came with a one year warranty. I complained and complained and told the people I would never buy Gateway anything again. Since I work on computers regularly Gateway's website has about 25 different systems registered to me under my name. As soon as I got this NV51B working I registered it. Eventually after seeing I had many systems registered to me the lady gave in and said they would extend my purchase date a week and cover the repair!!! When it got to Texas to be worked on at Acer, the tech called me and asked me some questions about what happened. I told him and he explained that about 50% of the time when someone is updating the BIOS and corrupts the process, the MOTHERBOARD BECOMES JUNK! Not even the techs could flash the BIOS and had to scrap the board!

Since he told me this can happen on just about any laptop I now find myself very very scared to mess with BIOS at all. Plus, the DV9308NR only has the one BIOS file and it's the original. I can't believe they never released another BIOS with better fan programming like they did for the Intel version's. Mine is the AMD version and they never released another BIOS for it. If someone out there can help me find a different BIOS or knows how to make any changes I am open to help. I admit I am not a pro and know there are many people in this forum who know much more than me! Not afraid to ask for help! Thanks for the input!

"Does it freeze with the 2nd HDD removed? Could be a bad SATA port causing the lock up."

I don't believe the SATA port is bad because my motherboard technician said he tested everything on this board but maybe he could have been wrong. I did send the laptop back to him once because one of the ram slots wasn't working so I'm pretty sure he checked this one over very well before shipping it back. How can you tell if you have a bad SATA port? Is there any way to tell? Well last night I read that your 2nd HDD can't be over 160GB in the AMD models and that the 2nd hard drive must have all of the same drivers for your OS. So last night I installed Windows 7 Pro 64 bit on my 160GB WD 7200rpm HDD. I'm going to try it out in a little while here. I'll let you guys know what happens.

 

If I am to have any faith at all in either HP or AMD, that will not be your issue. Why would there be a drive size limit? Where did you read that?

 

that's what an HP tech wrote in the HP forum.

 

Older laptops (mostly IDE days) had an LBA issue, where it can't address a HDD past like 160 GB per partition.

 

Had no clue about that thanks. Yeah this DV9308NR has SATA ports. Haven't tried putting the HDD back in yet today. Working on a couple PS3's. I found out the motherboard in my Probook 4530S handles 16GB DDR3 ram but HP says it maxes out at 8GB. I have the 8GB maxed out and dual 480GB SSHD's installed, but I would like to bump it up to the 16GB just to see if some how it runs better. LOL!