Question Boot problem after hdd caddy installation

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Nightsky1700

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May 9, 2019
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Hello, this is my first post here, so welcome everyone :)

Here's my problem. I recently bought an HDD Caddy for my Acer V3-571G laptop. In my standard hdd sata slot I have an SSD drive (ADATA 256GB), and I wanted to have a secondary one (TOSHIBA HDD 500GB) as a replacement for my optical drive. The problem is, when I set this up, I can't force my BIOS to boot from the drive that is in the primary slot (ADATA). Instead, for some reason it chose to always use my hdd caddy as a primary boot device - I'm completely out of ideas why...

I have InsydedH20 bios (version 1.13) and its boot options capabilities are pretty limited. I'm pasting all screenshots from my bios screens:

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I have already tried all different kinds of the boot order in bios - no results.
I have tried "Enter" on each listed item (especially on HDD0 item) in hope to see a menu with a choose option - unfortunately not 🙁
I formatted the drive that went to the caddy (TOSHIBA) so it's completely erased.

When I remove the caddy, then in bios boot options ADATA is correctly listed. When the caddy is in, the Toshiba name is there. It somehow overrides the primary sata slot.

The only thing that I was able to do, was enabling F12 boot menu at the startup, so when I press it, I can finally see a choose option for the drive to boot from (both of the drives are listed). When I choose the correct one (ADATA), it starts as I expect, I can see both drives in my system and I can easily read/write to the one that is in the caddy.

So the problem seems to be in BIOS (I guess) but I don't know what should be the correct step to make it work.

Does anyone have any idea why is this happening? (And is there any way to make it work?)
Thanks
 
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Is there no way to change "HDD0" to your ADATA drive? I can't see the legend at the bottom of the BIOS setup screen, so I have to ask.

Not sure if it would change anything, but if you can afford to lose whatever is currently on both drives, I would delete the volumes on both of them, remove the Toshiba with the caddy, reinstall your OS on the ADATA while it's in the HDD0 port, and then re-insert your Toshiba drive and format it from within the Windows desktop (Disk Management).

If it still happens even after, there's some weird prioritizing going on in the BIOS setup.
 
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So I have v1.13 which appears to be the newest for these laptop series shipped with Win7 by default. I read somewhere that after updating to 2.x Win7 would stop working.

There is also an option to download some user mods form bios related forums but not sure how safe that would be.
I came across bambar's answer on this one:
https://www.bios-mods.com/forum/Thread-REQUEST-Acer-Aspire-V3-571-G-BIOS-Unlock?pid=51983#pid51983

but someone else reported it's not a recommended way of doing this (althoug it got some positive feedback). See svl7's answer:
https://www.bios-mods.com/forum/Thread-REQUEST-Acer-Aspire-V3-571-G-BIOS-Unlock?pid=52045#pid52045
 
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Prostar Computer said:
Is there no way to change "HDD0" to your ADATA drive? I can't see the legend at the bottom of the BIOS setup screen, so I have to ask.

Not sure if it would change anything, but if you can afford to lose whatever is currently on both drives, I would delete the volumes on both of them, remove the Toshiba with the caddy, reinstall your OS on the ADATA while it's in the HDD0 port, and then re-insert your Toshiba drive and format it from within the Windows desktop (Disk Management).

If it still happens even after, there's some weird prioritizing going on in the BIOS setup.
Click to expand...

No, there is no way of changing it. You can't enter any "choose" menu while on HDD0 item. I actually did what you said. I installed a fresh Win7 on ADATA and after that I inserted the caddy with Toshiba. After this change the HDD0 immediately switched from ADATA to Toshiba...When I remove the caddy, it goes back to ADATA. Agree that there is something strange with prioritizing in the BIOS setup, and from what I heard, people have problems doing the opposite (boot from the caddy) - which happens to be working by default on my setup.

Strangely enough, this caddy was actually sold as a caddy compatible with Acer V3-571g. Had no idea that this would cause so many headaches - thought it would just kick off and start running smoothly without any additional work. Didn't expect it to go as far as bios flashing...

Thanks!
 
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Nightsky1700 said:
So I have v1.13 which appears to be the newest for these laptop series shipped with Win7 by default. I read somewhere that after updating to 2.x Win7 would stop working.

There is also an option to download some user mods form bios related forums but not sure how safe that would be.
I came across bambar's answer on this one:
https://www.bios-mods.com/forum/Thread-REQUEST-Acer-Aspire-V3-571-G-BIOS-Unlock?pid=51983#pid51983

but someone else reported it's not a recommended way of doing this (althoug it got some positive feedback). See svl7's answer:
https://www.bios-mods.com/forum/Thread-REQUEST-Acer-Aspire-V3-571-G-BIOS-Unlock?pid=52045#pid52045
Click to expand...

Yes, looking further into the updates past v 1.13 I came across this. "For systems that shipped with a BIOS, there is no way to upgrade it to UEFI by using any downloads we offer on our site. Some systems that shipped with Windows 7, were upgradeable to Windows 8, but did not offer support for upgrading from BIOS to UEFI."

I would also stay away from a moded bios.

This won't be any consolation but I use a laptop with a similar problem. Whenever any drive is plugged into a usb port it tries to boot from it and hangs. No changing of the boot order (and saving) in the bios will change this. The only solution I have found is a/ either be sure no drives are attached when I boot (a real pain because I use several) or b/ use the boot menu (in my case F11 ... this is what I usually do). After a bit, this has become 2nd nature and really ... it is only a couple of extra keystrokes so not really a big deal.

Thinking of "making lemonade from lemons" ... you could choose to look at it as an extra layer of "unauthorized laptop use" protection. Without knowing about the F12 boot menu no one would be able to boot up your laptop lol.
 
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