Please help, need to boot T420 from second hard drive without going into bios...

Hey guys, I have a T420 given to me from work, however without admin rights, I can't do much on it. I was thinking of putting in a SSD with another install of Windows 7 in a caddy and replace the optical drive with it.

Before I go ahead and purchase the caddy, I just want to know if it's possible to boot into the second drive and use my own install of OS without changing the boot order in the bios (I don't have access to the bios). Would the machine automatically recognize that there is an OS installed on the second drive?

Thanks in advance.

 

Yes if you hit F12 during POST, it will bring up the menu to choose a Boot device.

 

Maybe they meant it as a work machine. Given that you don't have admin rights and can't access the BIOS, it's likely that the BIOS is set up to boot only from the main drive. You could ask them.

 

It should be possible to find that out by hitting F12 and seeing if one can select the optical drive as a boot device.

John

 

There are several ways to do this. Technically you don't even need another drive in the Ultrabay. You could use a "boot from VHD" method to add your personal installation to the existing primary drive.

But yes, you can also install to another drive in the Ultrabay or a mSATA drive in the WWAN PCIe slot.

Lots of options.

I seriously doubt the local IT guys have it locked down so tight you can't. They probably don't know how.

 

Hey guys, thanks for the suggestions. I tried F12, it brings up the boot menu however only the HDD is shown as an option, the optical drive is not there.

I then tried to pressing "tab" on that screen and then going into the bios setup menu, I was successful, however I couldn't change anything on the boot menu, all the options were disabled. I clicked the top option, and it brought me to an information screen listing the HDD as the only boot option, and everything else under "disabled from boot priority order"....

Any ideas? what's the the "boot from VHD" method?

 

When you install a second windows (in a separate partition, in a second HDD, etc) the seocond installation will be added to the boot menu.

If for whatever reason this doesn't happen you can still do it manually using easybcd.

Now what you have to understand is: the second HDD is missing just from the bios boot menu or isn't seen by the bios at all ? In the second case the whole matter will be more complicated.

 

First of all, it's possible the local IT crew disabled your ability to boot from any other device other than the primary HDD/SSD. That is easily done in the BIOS.

"Boot from VHD" allows you to pre-create a VHD file that becomes the container for a Windows 7 installation. Instead of installing to a partition, you install into the mounted VHD file. It's pretty easy once you get the hang of it. It's also really easy to move that VHD file to another physical drive later if needed. Bing or Google it for instructions.

 

I can't install anything anywhere, cuz even though I can see the drives, I can't boot from USB or optical drive...