HDD not recognized in laptop ODD Caddy

danysan2002
danysan2002 Member Posts: 3 New User

Hi there! This is the first time I'm posting here, I'm an IT guy myself and most of the time I fix whatever I need with a lot of searching and research, but I'm just out of ideas, it's been 2 days since I'm trying everything.

I have an Acer E5-572G, came with a 1tb HDD and I just bought a 240 kingston uv400 SSD. I put the SSD in the main HDD slot (to use the full sata 3 6gbps bandwidth) and I bought an ODD caddy, to replace my dvd-rw with the old HDD.

I mounted everything, booted from an external usb, installed windows 10 x64 (HDD wasn't showing in bios, nor in the windows partition choser installer). The SSD runs perfectly, but I can't get the hdd to work. When I start the laptop, the HDD 'tries' to power on, you can hear it spin for like 2 seconds, then dies. The led is always on, so the caddy works, it's just something on the laptop/software part.

Here's what I've tried so far:
- updated BIOS, from 1.01 to 1.09 (latest version on the acer website)
- checked in disk management to see if it's recognized, but not letter-assigned (it doesn't show up there, never did while in the caddy, only the ssd)
- used my HDD in an external usb rack, it works and i can see both my partitions so the HDD is working
- tried 2 more caddies (i have a friend who sells them), nothing, the light goes on but the hdd doesn't, so most likely the caddy works too
- tried another HDD in the caddy, that one didn't work either
- i tried using the caddy in 2 different laptops (both running windows 10, so if it is a windows issue, it's understandable why it didn't work on either)
- installed Intel AHCI Controller driver / Intel Chipset driver, nothing
- tried turning on/off wifi and power saving mode (saw a topic where someone got it to work like this on W10 and it sounds just plain stupid, but it worked for him, not for me though)
- installed windows 7 x64 with all the drivers and etc, I saw most people complaining it was a W10 problem, but it doesnt work in 7 either

I'm running out of ideas, is it possible that my laptop just can't use the second sata slot for a HDD? Because I can't figure it out.

Answers