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I have a Dell Studio 1735 laptop for which I just bought an SSD (Crucial M4 64GB) as an upgrade. The laptop has two HDD bays, each with a different connector. Bay 1 is the bay in which the stock HDD was originally placed, it has a connector on the motherboard that looks like a miniaturised SATA connector and comes with an adaptor (Dell Part U589F) that works with both the SSD and the HDD just fine. Bay 2 has a different connector that is the same size as the SATA connector on the drives but it accepts a sort of 'bladed' adaptor that I bought from a third party.

I want to get both drives working with the SSD in Bay 2 and the old HDD in Bay 1 where it was originally.

I've played around with the configurations and found that:

  • The SSD works only in Bay 1, in Bay 2 I get a "internal hard disk drive not found" message from the BIOS and I'm unable to do anything such as access the BIOS setup screen.
  • The existing hard drive works in either bay, even when using the new interposer.
  • Booting with both (SSD in Bay 2, HDD in Bay 1) gives me a black screen after POST with a flashing cursor but no error messages.
  • The chipset is an Intel 965 with an ICH8-M controller.

Any help much appreciated!

Hennes
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Paul Beesley
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1 Answers1

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How is the boot priority set in BIOS? You need to make sure that the 1st hard drive is the one with the OS installed on

admintech
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