Replacement Solid State Hard Drive not recognized on initial boot

Question

I recently purchased a replacement Dell 30GB solid state HDD to go in a Latitude D620. I was able to load windows from the recovery CD and put all of the drivers on it but started to see some issues with booting. If the machine is off and you try to do an initial power on the system does not see the HDD. If you hit f1 to retry nothing. If you power off and power back on nothing. If you reset using ctrl-alt-del it will see the drive and boot properly. It seems as if the drive needs to fully power up before the system tries to access it but this is just a guess. Any ideas as to what the actual issue is or how to resolve it?

ejn63 · Answer

Try setting the system BIOS to do a full power on self test - that may give the drive enough time to be ready for the system to boot from it.

You should see the option in your BIOS setup (F2 at powerup).

teqmod · Answer

I did not see the option for setting the self test in the BIOS. Under POST behavior I did set the 'Fast Boot' option to thorough to try to slow the boot process. This did not work though. Where is the setting for the full self test in the BIOS?

Ryanh6178 · Answer

Hi Teqmod,   Sometimes the timings between peripherals and the system can be corrected via BIOS updates.  You can get the latest here.

teqmod · Answer

I actually was in the process of upgrading the BIOS when I saw this message. Good call, we were using the A02 BIOS and A09 is what I downloaded from Dell. There is a new option listed regarding SATA power management. With this setting enabled the machine recognized the drive on first boot.  Of course I am going to try it a few more times to make sure  :)

Storage, Drives & Media

Replacement Solid State Hard Drive not recognized on initial boot

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