T420 Second HDD in Drive Bay Caddy not powering up

[jlvanta]

So I installed a SSD drive and bought a HDD caddy from ebay to put my Hardrive in it.

My surprise was that when you press the power button, the drive starts to spin and 2 seconds later shuts off.
Drive is Ok, works internally, tried a different brand , same result.

No Bios Settings found relateds to it.

Anyone experienced something similar?

[RealBlackStuff]

Welcome to the forum.
Your SSD is set in BIOS as the boot-drive with the main OS.
The Ultrabay (with your HDD) is "only" an accessory, and "only" works when accessed, which is what it was designed for.
(You could make the Ultrabay-HDD your boot-drive in BIOS).
So what's your problem?
You don't want that HDD to spin all the time, do you?

[jlvanta]

Welcome to the forum.
Your SSD is set in BIOS as the boot-drive with the main OS.
The Ultrabay (with your HDD) is "only" an accessory, and "only" works when accessed, which is what it was designed for.
(You could make the Ultrabay-HDD your boot-drive in BIOS).
So what's your problem?
You don't want that HDD to spin all the time, do you?

Hey thanks for the welcome

Will try to make the Ultrabay the first drive (SSD) and put the large 500GB into the HDBAY and see if it fixes the problem.

The thing is, even while I dont need the drive to spin all the time, it only gets 2 sec of power and then shuts completly off, so the bios is not reading this drive as available on boot, neither once I boot into the OS its not there and not available.

Tried 2 different caddys in case the one was faulty.

[RealBlackStuff]

Just sold my T420, so can't test.
You could try in BIOS to change Config/Power/Optical Drive to High performance or Normal, if it's set to Silent.

[jlvanta]

Just sold my T420, so can't test.
You could try in BIOS to change Config/Power/Optical Drive to High performance or Normal, if it's set to Silent.

I tried your suggestion, did not work.

I put SSD into DVD bay, same thing happend, no power
No way to make that drive the Bootdrive or viceversa...

I have no idea whats happening

[RealBlackStuff]

Check Bios Startup/Uefi/Legacy settings.
You should be able to boot from a CD/DVD, resp. a HD in that Ultrabay.

[Cigarguy]

I have a T420 with a SSD in main drive bay with a HDD in the Ultrabay. Works great. Might be you have a bad Ultrabay adapter.

[sktn77a]

The ultra-bay drive powers down after a few minutes by design. There should be a setting to prevent this. Are you using the Lenovo Windows 7 system image and ThinkVantage tools?

[jlvanta]

This is driving me bonkers...

I forgot to mention that I was running a Mod Bios with Wifi Whitelist, so I tried to get back to a "oficial Bios" and see if it fixes the Power issue on drive bay..

No luck! same result! Drive powers down after 1,2 seconds.

Tried SSD, with different HDDs brands inside bay , inside drive slot, swapped them, nothing, always the same ending. Got 2 caddys and tried them on 2 different laptops and they work out of the box.

Fiddled inside bios with DVD/CD Power settings (Normal High Perfomance) ...nothing.

But once you insert the original DVD it powers up the whole time, it loads a Ubuntu Live DVD perfectly and works, so i dont think its the sata slot inside the ultrabay

Im running out of ideas here, can someone give me a hand please?