Secondary HDD bay not working

I have a recently refurbed HP Pavillion dv9000 running Vista SP2. I had the known video chipset issue on the motherboard repaired. After reassembling the laptop and running the HP Recovery disc on a new 120GB HDD, the secondary drive bay doesn't respond. It doesn't show up under My Computer or in the Device Manager. It's as though it doesn't exist.

 

What about in Control Panel - Administrative Tools - Computer Management - Disc Management. Does it show in there? and make it Active.

 

No, it doesn't show up there either.

 

What are the specs on the second drive? Size, Speed Sata1 or 2? Ive just resolved this issue myself. and found another possible. solution as well. My solution worked for me so it may help. The other one is posted some where on hp's forums but I can't remember where. My 2nd drive was a sata2 320gb the second drive wont run a sata2 unless you use a jumper and slow it down to 1.5 gb from 3.0. Long story short did'nt have a jumper around so U just swaped the drives and cloned the first drive to the second with "Clonezilla". Now have 1st drive 320gb sata2 and 2nd 120gb sata1 Sata1 runs at 1.5gb. hope this helps.

 

I have 2 "spare" drives, both are SATA1 120gb. I've tried both with the same results. I've been through the HP forums, nothing posted there helped.

 

I can't recall if I flashed the bios before or after installing the drives. Try the most recent bios and See if that helps. My drive was not detected with vista or several live linux distros at first. The latest bios I found was version 43. That bios is for an AMD the intell uses different versions.

 

I flashed the bios to 43 last night, no change.

 

Boot it in a ubuntu live cd an see if gparted recognizes it.

 

I don't know what that means. What's ubuntu live?

 

Ubuntu is a linux distro but gparted wont see it either. Go to HP and update drivers I also did this at time of bios flash just can't remember in what order but the bios or one of the drivers made drive visible to vista.

 

All the drivers were already up to date when I flashed the BIOS. I also tried upgrading to win7, but there are no new drivers for win7. I'm now using the HP recovery disc to format the main HDD and do a clean Vista install, essentially factory defaulting the laptop, just with updated BIOS.

 

It took 6 or 8 reboots to get disk to be recognized. The first 2-3 took up to 10 minutes to boot but they got faster till now It boots fine. BTW heres the link to the other fix Second HDD fitted to a Pavilion DV9000 - HP Support Forum Good luck.

 

Issue resolved. It turned out to be something simple, the pin adapter on the housing was defective. Thanks for your suggestions.