Adding second ssd backup drive to 7010 MT issues

Question

I have a 7010 MT and am trying to add a back up ssd hard drive internally. I connected the power and data cables, and what happens is, at bootup windows 7 pro gets stuck at the windows logo, for about four minutes before it completes booting up. Computer boots up fine when I unplug the second drive. There are four sata headers on the board, one is for the operating hard drive, the other is for a CD-Rom drive......I've tried plugging in the hard drive and the cd-rom into different sata headers, but that either doesn't help, or the computer doesn't boot up at all.

Tonega · Answer

The disk has existing partitions. I was able to work with the second hard drive in the computer, but it appears, it's just at start-up that issues happen - though, shutting down also takes longer with the second drive in. Further, I found that if I plugged the OS hard drive or the cd-rom drive into a different sata header than the ones they were originally hooked up to, the machine won't boot at all. The second hard-drive is a samsung ssd........

Henry dell · Answer

What do you see when you run disk management? Is the drive online? does it have any existing partitions?

bj11213 · Answer

Windows is sensitive to the setup of the discs as you have found out. I suspect you have an issue with the setup of your drives in BIOS: for some bizarre reason some Dell systems are shipped with one drive but the BIOS set to RAID mode & if this is so then your system may be delaying booting whilst it figures out why the drives aren't mirroring each other.

The bad news is that if you change the SATA configuration from AHCI-RAID to AHCI your system won't boot.

Here's how to work around. You'll need a copy of a disk copying program (AOMEI Partition Assistant is probably the best bet if you're not used to linux variants) and an external USB disk the same size or larger than your system disk. Clone the system disk to the external disk, change the BIOS SATA mode setting, boot from the external disk & reverse the cloning. (If I were you I'd use a new disk in the computer for the reverse cloning so you can more or less painlessly revert back to the original system disk & BIOS setting if things go wrong!)

You should now be able to boot (though you will probably need to reboot after the system finds the disk drivers for the new configuration) and then adding the second disk should be a breeze.

Incidentally you should check your system service manual to find which SATA drive ports are the fast ones, some motherboards have one or more "slow" SATA II ports as well as two "fast" SATA III ports, use the fast ports for the system disk & SSD and connect the optical drive (of you have one) to one of the slow ports.

Hope that helps ...

Tonega · Answer

I looked in the bios and the hard drive is set to AHCI, not raid. Will see if I can find a service manual.

bj11213 · Answer

https://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/optix/en/optiplex_7010_technical_guidebook.pdf

I reckon the system drive should be connected to SATA 0 & the 2nd HDD to SATA 1.

Do you have any idea how much power your system and its accessories are drawing? It may be that the power supply is overloaded at boot time & some neccessary device(s) aren't initialising until some others have gone into sleep mode. You could test this by disconnecting the power lead from the optical drive. If the system then boots normally (but with the optical drive "missing", of course) then you probably have a slightly excessive power draw.

Tonega · Answer

Thanks everybody for your help. It seems that the sata cable was bad. I swapped it for another and everything appears to be o.k.......Unless it starts having problems again, i'll assume it was the cable.

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Adding second ssd backup drive to 7010 MT issues

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