W510 2nd Hardrive Not Recognized in Boot

I picked up a 12.7mm hardrive caddy from ebay and installed a 2nd Solid State Drive in there.
Tried booting up but it doesn't recognize the drive at all.. Sata CDROM works fine, but not the caddy..

Any Ideas?

This is what i purchased..

 

Is the SSD new and has it been tried in another machine or the primary drive bay to confirm it's working?

 

You mean you tried to boot up from the ultrabay SSD (not going to happen) or you booted from the default drive and your pc does not recognize the ultrabay SSD?

 

FYI Fem, you can boot from the Ultrabay.

 

You really can??? Fantastic! I did not know...

 

Yep, there are several methods actually.

Old school would be to install an OS on a partition using a drive in the Ultrabay hard drive adaptor.

New school is to "boot from vhd" which resides on a drive in the ultrabay hard drive adaptor.

I do the latter daily.

 

The 2nd ssd is a drive i used in my sony.
It just doesn't read it all together, yet alone boot from it.
I simply want to format the drive and use it as a 2nd hardrive.

 

Then most likely the problem is the caddy you bought on eBay.

 

the adapter you linked is a knockoff (likely purchased on eBay).   those are notorious for not working in W510/T410/T510 systems.

if you're using an original Lenovo adapter purchased through a reseller then there's no reason why it wouldn't work.   they're all tested before shipping.

if you have an original adapter, here are some things to check:
- BIOS boot device list (if it's not on this list then it's drive-related)
- password set on the SSD (if so, install it in the Sony and clear it)
- recognition in disk management (run diskmgmt.msc and see if it appears - if so, mark it as 'online')
- try a different drive in the adapter

 

Booting from the ultrabay drive definitely works for me with the original adapter and an ordinary drive.

 

Can you post picture of what tray you bought? Since it is the 12.7mm tray does it have no gaps between the tray and the laptop?

Keep us updated plz! I'm planning to buy a 12.7mm adapter from ebay also. The last third party adapter I bought for my t400 worked just fine.

You might wanna check in your bios before the OS boots up to see if it recognizes the harddrive. If not, maybe reformat it somehow and put it in?

 

I have a W510 and cannot boot from genuine Lenovo 2nd hdd adapter. 2nd drive is recognized , is online and I can open it and use files when I boot from prime drive. I set boot sequence to put 2nd drive in higher order than prime drive but no luck. I get blue crash screen with no real info title and then after a few seconds the system restarts and tries again. The 2nd drive is a drive from another thinkpad that is loaded with windows xp pro and boots fine as primary drive in other lenovo laptops. Prime drive is WIN 7 PRO 64 bit.
Any suggestions would be helpful.

Thanks

 

You can't just pop it in and expect the BCD store to know what to do with it. In additional to the boot configuration data, you are likely hitting an issue with the AHCI driver differences.

 

Well the boot process seems to see the correct drive in the 2nd HDD adapter. If I put the drive into the primary location it boots fine so I am not sure why AHCI driver is diffferent for the 2nd HDD. Also the 2nd drive will boot from the W510 eSATA connecter with an Ultra eSata enclosure.
Does anyone have a specific recommendation to troubleshoot or fix this problem?
Thanks