T400s eSATA and Ultrabay questions

First, has anyone had success booting from eSATA? I tried it last night, I took out the 1.8in HD and hooked up an external 300GB eSATA drive. I inserted the newly burned recovery discs and restored my system just fine to that HD. But upon reboot, the system wouldn't find that hard drive. Bios is set to boot off of every hard drive, but it doesn't see it. I like do to this to test my recovery DVD's to make sure they burned properly before I reload the system. Because I don't have another 1.8in HD to swap with, I had to try this route. I don't have the Ultrabay HD adapter yet either (but I will buy one soon).

So, I plan on buying an Ultrabay adapter for the HD as I hardly use optical drives anymore.

But, I was curious, does anyone know if Lenovo makes an external Ultrabay drive holder? It would be nice to be able to put my optical drive in this and just hook it up to the notebook via eSata or USB when I need it and not have to take out the HD that I'm going to put in the Ultrabay. I know back in the day some companies (even IBM) would make external holders you could slide your optical drive or floppy drive and use externally via USB or even the parallel port.

 

I've been wondering about the second half od that question, myself, and wish I had a good answer. I've found these old threads:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?p=5279057
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=349325
(for the second one, see the top of page 3, specifically)
but haven't found a solution I'm completely satisfied with, yet. I'm amazed Lenovo doesn't have such a thing available.

 

Good news. It WILL boot from the eSATA port. You just need to change the SATA Controller Mode Option in the BIOS from AHCI to Compatibility. My external hard drive showed up as ATA HDD2. I was able to select it from the boot menu by hitting F12.

 

Any other ideas on the second half here? I'd love a ESata/USB (combo?) enclosure that adds a little bit of protection instead of leaving the drive bare with a couple of cables.

 

I stumbled across this thread when looking for the answer to my question...

As for the answer to yours... I have a T61 6459CTO with a 320gb hd...

Now, mine uses 2.5 in SATA hd's but you might be able to do something similar if you research a little.

I have a 100gb hd in my ultrabay adapter. I also have the Thinkpad Advanced Docking Station (old school, kinda). The docking station has a swap bay that fits the DVD/CD combo drive perfectly.

I know it's a little different setup than you are looking for, and of course the docking station is FAR from portable... but it works for me! I just keep my CD/DVD drive in the dock and use it at home when i need it, otherwise my internal SD card reader will do for just about anything I use the CD/DVD for.