Adding a second harddisk on L540

[hmilz]

Hi everyone,

I am trying to add a second HDD to my L540 using a caddy for the Ultrabay. The primary HDD is a Samsung 128GB SSD, 2,5", attached to the internal SATA3 port. The OS is on the internal disk, and for various reasons I have no way to change this (why would I, anyway?).

The interesting part comes when I insert the second disk and boot the machine, the boot manager chain (GRUB -> Smartcard login on a mini Linux system -> GRUB4DOS -> Windows) fails to load windows and displays a blank screen. The reason is that the internal disk is seen by Windows and Linux alike to be attached to Bus Number 4, Target Id 0, LUN0, and the second disk is on Bus Number 0, Target Id 0, LUN0. Which basically means that the second disk is enumerated _before_ the internal disk, and the boot manager chain does not find the Windows OS that should be booted. Screenshots from Windows Device Manager:





I played around with my own GRUB4DOS settings but I cannot make the system accept that the internal disk is the first disk.

(The second disk works fine when I hot plug it after Windows boot but this is not a permanent solution...)

Q: What makes the OSes (and the BIOS, I assume, which I can only view but not change due to a BIOS supervisor password) think that the internal disk should be enumerated second?

PS: Things get funny when I swap the 2 disks. HDD0 is now the Toshiba disk, and the machine wants to boot from the Toshiba disk.

Confused... Thank you for any insight!

[RealBlackStuff]

Have you tried pressing F12 a few times immediately at boot time?
This should give you a menu with your choice of which drive to boot from.
(Unless that function was blocked before the SVP was set).

[hmilz]

I know, but everything is blocked in the BIOS, and protected by supervisor passwd. I can only boot from HDD0 and PXE.

[RealBlackStuff]

In that SVP case you cannot boot from a 2nd HDD/SSD in the CD-bay, unless it's the only drive.
Or run that OS in a VM on the 2nd drive.
The L540 also should have a WWAN slot, in which you can put a 3rd drive, an M.2-2242 SSD.
If you put your main (booting) OS on the M.2 drive, then you could probably run a VM on each other drive.
But until you remove the SVP, there's not much extra you can do.

[hmilz]

Actually, I do not intend to boot from the second HDD. This was just for testing purposes. The problem is that as soon as I insert the second HDD, the machine sees it as the first drive (due to the SCSI Bus numbering which I think is weird), and _tries_ to boot from it, ignoring the internal HDD. My purpose for the 2nd HDD is only as an additional mass storage because the first disk is nearly full, and I do not want to lug around a USB disk.

I should add that this is my company's machine, and I am not supposed to change (too many) things

So the question is, why is the SCSI bus numbering as it is (first / internal port - bus 4, second port - bus 0), and is there a way to circumvent it. I hear nothing like this in any of the fora, so is this machine the only one with such a strange phenomenon?

[RealBlackStuff]

All you should need to do is reformat that 2nd drive, so it does not have any boot-sector(s) on it.
Worst case: put the boot-disk in the CD-bay and the (formatted) spare drive in the main bay.

Or go to your IT dept. and ask them nicely (a bottle of Schnaps perhaps?)