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    HP 6710b HDD Caddy issues

    Discussion in 'Hardware Components and Aftermarket Upgrades' started by Aerooo, Jun 3, 2010.

  1. Aerooo

    Aerooo Newbie

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    Hey guys,

    I've recently bought a SATA-TO-PATA hard drive caddy on eBay for my HP 6710b. Thing is, when I install a hard drive in it, chuck it in my laptop and run something off the hard drive (or write to it) it works fine for a couple minutes, and then just dies. Windows Explorer will hang when I try to access the drive, and the drive will eventually disappear altogether. From that point on, my system won't even shut down properly and rebooting while the caddy is connected won't even get me past the Windows 7 splash animation most of the time. The booting issue seems quite random.

    I've spent quite a bit of time browsing around the net trying to find a solution to this issue, but I can't seem to find anything. Also, barely any HP 6710b users seem to have issues with these caddies. This is actually the second one I've received from the seller, since I had similar issues with the first one I got. Just to confirm, the hard drive works just fine in an external USB enclosure.

    I've checked my BIOS but the HP bioses are pretty limited when it comes to configurable options. I've tried hot-swapping it, without success and I've used hdparm to set the drive to UDMA5 mode. Needless to say nothing made any difference what so ever.

    If you have any idea as to why this is happening and what I could do to solve this, it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
     
    Aerooo, Jun 3, 2010
    #1
  2. User Retired 2

    User Retired 2 Notebook Nobel Laureate NBR Reviewer

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    See Quirks applicable to PATA optical drive caddy's here. I'd suggest bootup without the caddy in the drive, disable the IDE port in Device Manager, hotplug the caddy, enable the IDE port. Likely the bios is setting up the port for an optical drive which means it's not right for a HDD.
     
    User Retired 2, Jun 4, 2010
    #2