Lenovo ThinkPad T420 is not detecting second HDD

[Chandramukhi Chautala]

I own Lenovo ThinkPad T420 and now I was willing to add a second HDD in place of the optical drive and have bought a HDD for the same as well but then the problem that I am facing here is that the second HDD is just not getting detected by T420, I am not having any other issue with it, I don’t know why is it not able to detect the second HDD, is there any troubleshooting that I can try out??

[HamsiniI]

I own Lenovo ThinkPad T420 and now I was willing to add a second HDD in place of the optical drive and have bought a HDD for the same as well but then the problem that I am facing here is that the second HDD is just not getting detected by T420, I am not having any other issue with it, I don’t know why is it not able to detect the second HDD, is there any troubleshooting that I can try out??

Before I suggest you something about the same I just wanted to know the following things:

1. Have you checked it out in the device manager?
2. Have you tried doing scan for hardware changes?
3. Is the optical drive turned off in the power manager?

Just check out these things and then let me know what you have.

[Chandramukhi Chautala]

I will answer you in the same way:

1. I have checked out in the device manager and it is not appearing there
2. I have tried out the scan for hardware changes trick for several times as well
3. I am not aware of the steps to turn off the optical drive in the power manager

Can you just let me know the way to do it, so that I can proceed further with the same?

[HamsiniI]

For turning off the optical drive go in to the power manager and there will be an "Idle settings" in Advance Mode followed by "Turn off optical drive to save power" option so you just have to check mark the same, just try it out and see if that helps. If that does not, then just try to put back the optical drive and see if it is working fine, there are possibilities that something might have went wrong while unmounting the optical drive, just perform these possible solutions and then let me know the response you get for the same .You should also check out the hdd on some other machine to see if it not faulty.

[Chandramukhi Chautala]

I have already tried swapping the optical drive and it is working fine immediately after that so I am quite sure that I have not made any mistake in the Unmounting process, I have tried using the hdd on other machine and it is getting recognized without any issues so even there is nothing wrong with the hdd as well, I have also tried out the power management option and it does not seems to be making any difference, is there any other things that I can check out?? I have checked out the in BIOS as well but then it does not seems to be there in the boot order options, I thought that there was some compatibility issue but then I have now confirmed that it is compatible, I don’t know what is the issue all about. i am not able to track out the cause of this issue. Any further help regarding the same will be highly appreciated.

[Welllllll]

Even I need some help regarding the same, in my case I am having T420 and I am willing to add 2nd HDD to the same, I have bought 500 GB SATA HDD and I am quite sure that it is compatible with the Lenovo, other than this I have bought a TP SATA HDD Bay Adapter III as well and the problem that I am having here is that when I am adding the HDD in bay then the 2nd HDD is not shown in the My Computer but then I have checked out in the device manager and the disk drive is appearing there, I am not able to access the 2nd Hard Drive, is there anything that I can try out here to get it working???

[Vascon!cell]

If you are able to see the drive in the device manager then try performing the

• below things:
• Format the drive with NTFS format
• Partition the drive

When you are done with the same then the drive should appear in the Windows Explorer, just try it out and then post back the result that you get.