Replacing or Adding Samsung SSD 840 EVO BIOS not detecting drive in primary bay Precision M4700 Laptop

Replacing or Adding Samsung SSD 840 EVO BIOS not detecting drive in primary bay Precision M4700 Laptop

After searching several support sites and playing with this for a couple hours I found the solution.

First:  I used a 2nd HDD caddy (newmodeus.com) to add the drive in the DVD bay.  This was to copy all files from current drive to new SSD.

Used Disk Management to initialize and format the drive.  No problem.  Manually cloned the drive.  Cannot use Samsung utility if not doing OS drive.

Removed the current hard drive and swapped the drives SSD into prime caddy and original into 2nd DVD caddy.  Inserted SSD into primary bay, old drive into DVD bay.

Rebooted, bios did not detect SSD drive, but did find old drive in DVD bay.  Played with this for the couple hours.  New bios installed.  Changed settings.  Research (many have this problem - various hardware.)

Solution!  Inside the bay, you cannot see the connection of the drive to the motherboard.  It is not seated so will not be detected.

I had an unused, very small rubber foot from another device with a sticky bottom.  Attached it to the primary drive caddy near the end under the connectors and put the drive in the caddy.  Installed.  Rebooted.  Instantly detected by bios.

Not detected by bios issues with SSD drives should always check cables and connections first.  If you have a 2nd HDD bay to swap the drive (not available on the M4700) that solution has worked for other PCs with this problem.

Final working configuration:

A mcard 128GB Boot SSD, a SSD 840 EVO 1TB primary drive, the original spindle Drive/Blu-ray drive to swap as needed.

PM840 SSD performance (Magician):  SR 550..., SW 535... then after tuning system:  SR 1042... SW  971...

PM830 SSD mSATA after tuning:  SR 276...  SW 255...

Seagate Expansion 2TB USB 3 connected:  SR 159  SW 183  (note:  no dots are correct)

Cheers, Jeff