Weird Drive Problem - No urgent fix needed, but it is annoying

[noobPCgamer]

Basically I bought a laptop with a hdd preinstalled and a spare m.2 slot.  I took my m.2 and plugged it in and installed windows on it, then wiped the other drive of everything and booted into windows.  The original HDD wasn't showing up, to me this is pretty normal when doing this kind of thing so I go about trying to fix it.  After enabling and disabling many relevant things in the BIOS, I decide to just install windows on the HDD again just to see if it wasn't dead, sure enough it runs windows fine AND it can see my m.2 drive with the other windows on it.  Switch boot order in BIOS back to m.2 and the HDD disappears once again... strange right? Any ideas?

[suchamoneypit]

While booted on the M.2, open windows disk management tool. Can you see the HDD there?

[noobPCgamer]

6 hours ago, suchamoneypit said:

While booted on the M.2, open windows disk management tool. Can you see the HDD there?

nope. not in the partition software I use either

[NMS]

This can be a faulty drive.

Have you tried taking it out of the laptop and plugging it into another machine?

[noobPCgamer]

28 minutes ago, NMS said:

This can be a faulty drive.

Have you tried taking it out of the laptop and plugging it into another machine?

I have not tried this yet, I just assume because it works perfectly with Windows on it rather than the other drive, it isn't a problem with the drive.

I think it has something to do with how the motherboard decides to power the drives based on what it is booting from.   It's a Dell 7577 and most configurations come with the OS on an m.2, but I cheaped out and installed my own.

[NMS]

22 minutes ago, noobPCgamer said:

I have not tried this yet, I just assume because it works perfectly with Windows on it rather than the other drive, it isn't a problem with the drive.

I think it has something to do with how the motherboard decides to power the drives based on what it is booting from.   It's a Dell 7577 and most configurations come with the OS on an m.2, but I cheaped out and installed my own.

Then play with the boot priority a bit.

Perhaps if the drive isn't being booted first it doesn't recieve power?

[bcguru9384]

35 minutes ago, noobPCgamer said:

I have not tried this yet, I just assume because it works perfectly with Windows on it rather than the other drive, it isn't a problem with the drive.

I think it has something to do with how the motherboard decides to power the drives based on what it is booting from.   It's a Dell 7577 and most configurations come with the OS on an m.2, but I cheaped out and installed my own.

i think m.2 requires a minimum of 2 pciex1 lanes

sata needs only 1 pciex1 lane

if laptop has only 2 sata type lanes available it may drop hdd

i would assume the optical drive and usb ports are run from a sata 3&4 with ram either direct cpu or sata0 port

[noobPCgamer]

6 hours ago, NMS said:

Then play with the boot priority a bit.

Perhaps if the drive isn't being booted first it doesn't recieve power?

Yeah, I messed about with that a lot, but still never works.  Something to note is that Dell is aware of some issues with the M.2 slot, while this isn't one of them I'm sure it's linked somehow.
See here: https://www.dell.com/support/article/us/en/04/sln301036/windows-10-install-with-nvme-ssd-and-sata-drives?lang=en
If you follow the workaround, you see at the end it says

Quote

Once the Windows installation is completed, the SATA Storage Device controllers can be re-enabled without any issues and both the NVMe drive and the SATA drive(s) will function normally.

But after re-enabling SATA-0 and SATA-1, it fails to be see the HDD in my windows install.  It should be noted that the drive is a hybrid drive.

[noobPCgamer]

5 hours ago, bcguru9384 said:

i think m.2 requires a minimum of 2 pciex1 lanes

sata needs only 1 pciex1 lane

if laptop has only 2 sata type lanes available it may drop hdd

i would assume the optical drive and usb ports are run from a sata 3&4 with ram either direct cpu or sata0 port

There is no optical drive.  The BIOS lists 3 ports under the Drives section: SATA-0 SATA-1 and PCIe.  Again, when booting from HDD the PCIe Drive still works. Just not the other way around.

I'm pretty sure the HDD doesn't even spin up when booting from M.2 drive.
Also when I change some bios settings so that it boots from m.2 from the hdd, I notice it restarts twice upon exit, first it shuts off as normal, then on briefly but no display, just backlit keyoard turns on and then off again and it boots normally.  This doesn't happen on a normal save and exit of the BIOS, just happens when switching some settings for the drives to allow the M.2 to boot.

[NMS]

@noobPCgamer You should probably at this point contact DELL yourself. Clearly this is something that persists on not only your laptop.

[noobPCgamer]

Did some more digging and came across this: https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/922976/error-message-occurs-after-you-change-the-sata-mode-of-the-boot-drive
I'm pretty sure it applies to me.  I will take a look at it later.  The drives to show in the Device Manager, but it basically says SATA drivers couldn't start as there is a previous instance of them already there.  Seems simple enough.

[noobPCgamer]

Fixed the issue.  It turns out it was simple enough to fix, AHCI drivers were not properly installed, once I fixed that all the drives work perfectly.
If anyone needs it here is a tutorial for fixing it: https://goo.gl/io1pch

[noobPCgamer]

On 30/01/2018 at 12:39 AM, suchamoneypit said:

While booted on the M.2, open windows disk management tool. Can you see the HDD there?

For future reference, the drive DID show up in device manager but not disk management   in case you find someone with the same problem.