First time ever posting anything on a tech forum, so this issue really is a challenging one...
I bought a SATA Samsung 1TB 860 QVO SSD to put into my HP Pavilion 15-cs2008nw laptop, as a secondary drive. The machine does not POST with it attached to the motherboard.
OS: Windows 10 Home x64 0.0.18363 Build 18363
This laptop came pre-installed with a 256GB M.2 NVMe Toshiba SSD, however, in other configurations, 15-cs laptops come with 2.5" HDDs, so there was space for it in my machine too.
With the SATA SSD attached, the screen just shows a black screen, with the Caps Lock indicator showing 5 longs and 4 short blinks. According to HP's support website, it means that "The embedded controller times out waiting for the BIOS to return from system board initialization (end of POST)."
After two days of trying to fix the issue, I found out the following:
- It did POST with a 128GB NTFS-formatted Kingston SSD attached to the same SATA port
- It boots up with the 1TB SSD attached after disconnecting it from the mobo, setting the SATA controller mode to AHCI, instead of "Intel RST Premium with Optane", reconnecting the SATA SSD back, and it even boots into Windows (from the NVMe drive) and can see the SATA drive just fine! And every time, it takes just one restart to make it not boot again. And every time, the SATA controller mode resets back to "Intel RST..."
- After disconnecting both drives, booting the machine, then connecting only the SATA drive, it does POST, and not only once, and it also even does it with the "Intel RST..." mode.
- The 1TB SSD works just fine in a desktop computer I have, and I NTFS-formatted it.
- The issue is not the SATA-mobo ribbon cable, I tried two of them.
Thanks a lot in advance for your help