Help with 2nd HDD in optical bay not working properly...

Recently installed 2nd HDD in the optical drive bay using a caddy. Now getting a weird problem where My Computer never loads, green bar (indexing indicator?) across the top just moves along slowly and nothing shows.
Also files have no icons on the 2nd drive and right clicking on a file and clicking properties does not bring up the properties window. None of these things occur after a reboot and the 2nd drive works perfectly for awhile. I've disabled the drive and then primary drive works perfectly.

The 2nd drive is a clone of an external drive I was using before installing the internal one. I also bought the HDD second hand off a member here. It seemed to work fine in an external caddy.

To me there are only 3 possibilities. First is that the clone is a bad one and that I should reformat the HDD and start again. Second the HDD itself is faulty (unlikely) and third that the optical drive bay caddy I bought is faulty and that something on the bridge connecting drive to the SATA connector is causing issue.

Here are some screenshots. Be really grateful if anyone can help. My next step is to format the drive but I don't want to have to install everything again

 

Ive had exact issue. My combo was ssd in main bay + 500gb wd blue in caddy. Notebook in question was hp elitebook 8530p. Sometimes wd would not work or it would take ages for it to "load". Green bar filling And wndows would report disk inacessible. Reformating did not help, nor did caddy change. What did help was swapping places of ssd and my wd. Meaning my wd 500gb now resides in "main" hdd bay and ssd is in caddy. Why is it so i do not know. I've checked ssd in main bay + seagate 750gb in caddy from my m6600 and it worked flawlesly. But that wd blue refused to work in caddy. Make s re that after swap you select your optical bay to be priimary boot device.

i suck at tapatalk typin...

 

I really hope that isn't the case. I do really want another internal drive and I don't want to have to place my SSD in the optical drive as won't it suffer a loss in performance?
I heard the optical drive read/write speeds were slower due to slower interface the optical drive connector uses (SATA-I?).

After a more extensive google I think it could be related to "COM surrogate has stopped working" issues as detailed in Action Centre > Reliability Monitor. Going to try several different fixes for that and see what happens.

 

Why would optical bay be sata1? Sata 1 was ditched long ago. Chipset in my 8530p did not feature sata1 connectors - nor should your m15x as pm55 chipset in your notebook only supports sata2 speeds. You shouldnt see any difference whether your ssd is in your caddy or in main hdd bay.

 

Thanks for that info +1 Rep. I will consider switching them over but for now I'm trying various COM surrogate fixes and removing thumbnails from folders.
Seems to be working thus far.

 

Those are temporary solutions or at least they were in my case.

 

Yes you were right. It was working fine most of today until I plugged in my tablet to transfer some files. Icons lost their little thumbnails and I'm unable to load my computer again.
I read through the original thread on the M15x subsection and apparently the optical drive connector is indeed a SATA-I but that I should still be able to get similar read/write speeds to SATA-II.

A minor but extremely irritating bug!

 

Even if it is sata1 you shouldnt notice any real difference as system with ssd is not faster only due to sequential read and writes speeds. Access times and various random reads and writtes at warious q depths are what is most important.

Altho i dont c why would pm55 chipset featured in your notebook have sata1 port as chipset itself only features sata 2 speeds.

i suck at tapatalk typin...

 

After much much more reading I've tracked the problem down to this:

Problem signature
Problem Event Name: APPCRASH
Application Name: DllHost.exe
Application Version: 6.1.7600.16385
Application Timestamp: 4a5bc6b7
Fault Module Name: RPCRT4.dll
Fault Module Version: 6.1.7601.17514
Fault Module Timestamp: 4ce7ba59
Exception Code: c0020043
Exception Offset: 0005cd99
OS Version: 6.1.7601.2.1.0.768.3
Locale ID: 2057
Additional Information 1: fc2f
Additional Information 2: fc2f9cdd5d50de0305d154c272092cf2
Additional Information 3: df63
Additional Information 4: df63437e241613f141e08ab0b791f7a1

Apparently RPCRT4.dll is a process belonging to the Windows program. rpcrt4.dll is the Remote Procedure Call (RPC) API, used by Windows applications for network and Internet communication.

I did read that you can get dllhost.exe errors from hardware which makes sense but I just wonder if it was another component that I re-installed badly when I re-assembled laptop after teardown (necessary for 2nd HDD installation), perhaps wireless card?

Its so irritating and I don't have time to teardown machine and swap HDDs around at the moment!