Dell :: Anyone Attempted DIY Modular Bay Drive Caddy
Nov 26, 2008
im getting fed up looking around and i forgot to order a dvd writer for my e6500 as i done it over the phone but iv had a look in the bay and its only sata connectors which is dandy if i can find a sata dvd burner, but most importantly id need a coupla of caddys to mod or hack up so i have one for the hard drive and one for the dvd burner, dvd burner is a must have i dont know how i missed that one when ordering!
I'm thinking of removing my DVD drive and replacing it with a caddy and hard drive as explained here.
I don't use the DVD drive very often and would much prefer a 500GB or 1TB hard drive in there. The DVD drive can then be used externally via the eSATA port using this cable.
The ideal solution would be to use this NewmodeUS caddy as it supports the larger 12.7mm 1TB 2.5" hard drives and has a removable faceplate. The problem is the price.
At $55 including postage to the UK plus customs, VAT and clearance fees on top it's going to work out pretty expensive for what is essentially a slimline SATA to SATA extension
It seems that Dell still doesn't offer any Blu-ray drive for the new Precisions and Latitudes.Does anyone here know of a Blu-ray drive from any other manufacturer that fits into the new E-Modular bay?
I'm trying to understand the options available for a secondary hard drive on the Precision M4400. When configuring a new M4400, a 'Second Hard Drive' option is shown, but the only options are either a 120GB 5400rpm HD 'E-Module' or 64GB SSD 'E-Module'. It also says the following: Quote:
"Modular secondary storage devices can be used in both the system as well as in an External E-Modular Bay. They do not come with an external E-Modular Bay".
Here are my questions: 1) What does the 'E-Module' after the 120GB HD and 64GB SSD mean? 2) What is the Exterenal E-Modular Bay mentioned? A docking station or similar? 3) Could these options also apply to a Latitude E6500, although not offered directly from Dell?
I've just run into a major headache with a Travelmate 4404WLMi given to me by a friend. It appears that when he decided to keep the hard drive, he also lost track of the hard drive caddy for the machine.
I haven't had too much luck finding a caddy on eBay. I think part of the problem is, though I was able to find a service manual for the computer, Acer seems to have gotten confused and listed the part number for the TM4000 caddy in the service manual instead of this one. There's a picture right next to it for a caddy that looks entirely different from where the screw holes are on my 4404. The notebook disassembly guide is also all wrong for this unit.
Now, my question is, in the search for caddies on eBay I happened to notice that the one for the Aspire 3610 looks exactly like what I need. Would anyone happen to know if that caddy's the solution to my dilemma?
i just got an nc2400, seems to be a pretty great machine maybe greater with some optimizations
-overclocking. it seems very quiet and cool, has anyone overclocked with success?
-hdd in optical bay caddy, i want to know more about this. mainly, is the optical drive SATA, or would it basically be the same PATA interface as the old HDD?
im thinking the best thing for this laptop is either a PCMCIA SSD or PCMCIA to SATA for an at least normal hard drive speed.
unless mini pcie is the way to go? if anyone else has tried and succeeded at addressing the problem of slow hdd interface, id like to know your experience. i tried the intel 5100 mini card in the slot, said incompatible wifi device remove and restart at the bios. i guess this could be a general thing, with chipsets or something.
i want to use the DVD tray to add a 2nd hard drive using one of the many 2nd HD Hard Drive Caddy Trays i see online, but i want to use a solid state drive in it. Can this be done? From what i ascertain via product literature, it appears that any caddy tray i see online says "accepts 2.5' 12.7MM SATA HDD only" or some such." While there are many SSD's that are 2.5 inch, I've only seen ones that are either 7mm or "7mm (with 9.5mm adapter)." Is there a product (either a T520-compatible 9.5mm caddy tray or a 12.77mm SSD) that can make this work?Â
My Precision 4300 and Latitude D830 both had a modular bay that supported these batteries. They are extremely useful, as they're hot swappable and provide a boatload more power. I have 4 of them and can have power through any plane trip.
Looking at the models that Dell sells now, I can't seem to find any that would support modular batteries. It seems there is still a modular bay but no battery that would fit it.
Has Dell gone completely insane? That was the #1 feature that kept me with Dells all these years. Does anyone know anything about why they're not and if they will be supported again?
I made the mistake of staggering my laptop purchase and didn't get the second hard drive installed when I bought it. Now I'm trying to put two hard drives in it, but found out that dell didn't include the caddy for the second drive in the computer.
Bought a Inspiron 1720 (w/ HD), where is my 2nd HD caddy?.. So bad Dell doesn't send with the 2nd HD ready to use, bahh.... does anybody want to sell me one?
My laptop is Acer Aspire E5-572G. Im having problems connecting a Samsung 840 EVO SSD through a 2nd disk caddy.
I mean, it cannot be recognized at all even in BIOS. I am thinking to install new BIOS system , but when searching for it , I don't find anything and I don't want to flash wrong BIOS update.  [URL]] ....
It is exactly this model , I have entered the serial number I got from Ace's system information software. Any way to recognize the 2nd disk caddy along with the SSD?
Using my inspiron 2330 (only 18mths old ) as normal next thing it tells me it encountered fault and has to reboot anyway it keeps saying scanning and repairing drive (c) then does not allow me to log in so i manage to get into bios to do a scan and it guves me a error code of 2000-0142 Â validation code of 112406 and and then says harddrive 0-s/n wd-wmc152946178
When i finally manage to log in my desk top screen is flashing and keeps telling my hard drive fault ....
I'm doing a bit of research - I'm getting an M1730 as a replacement for a dead M1710 (Cheapest DELL XPS M1730 ever???) .. so I can't really change the spec of the machine until I get it .........
Something recently happened to my laptop, and now whenever I boot up my laptop, I get a message stating that "No drive detected", and I don't know if the hard drive might be damaged or not.
I tried connecting the hard drive directly to a desktop pc since it's a sata hard drive, but my desktop pc just froze on the boot screen whenever this hard drive was connected.
I also was going to try and use a hard drive external case to maybe connect it to the pc this way, but I wasn't sure if it would work
I would like to know if on DELL Inspiron 3531 motherboard there is the possibility to mount an optical drive, cause the laptop comes without the CD/DVD drive. If is it possible, where i can buy the optical drive for the laptop?
Two and a half year old Inspiron 5110 with Win 7 Home Premium. Â Cloned the internal drive using Easeus. Â Set the BIOS to USB in number one position, but this laptop won't boot from the external drive. Â Is this laptop bootable via a USB platter drive or a thumb drive? Also, can the recovery partition be used to repair Win 7 Â or is the recovery partition only to format the drive and install software the way it was when new ?
My system (Inspiron 1564 - Windows 7) is still configured as I received it from Dell. The C drive is 58.5 Gb and the D drive is 164 Gb.
The problem is that everything saves to the C drive and nothing uses the D drive.
I do not want to reformat in one drive, happy to keep 2 but want pictures, documents etc to be saved to the D drive as the C drive is getting full up. How do I make the change to point these files to the D drive?
On an old Inspiron 8000 laptop, I have a CD-ROM drive that only fits in the floppy drive slot. Will the BIOS recognize a boot CD in this new location? I believe it's an 18000 motherboard.
I hate for this to be my first post, but after looking everywhere on the internet and on this site (I've been lurking a while) I'm still at the same place I started with my Studio 15 laptop. I'll try to include as much detail as possible.
I had my laptop plugged into my LCD tv via an HDMI cable as I often do, and when I went to close the laptop to use just the LCD, the tv flashed, showed a blue screen of death for a quick second and then went black. I opened the laptop and it was still on, but the screen wouldn't go on.
I restarted my computer and from there on out it kept making a beeping noise and stalling for a really long time at the "Dell Studio/progress bar" screen. After leaving it at that screen for a while the clicking stop and then it allowed me to access the Boot Options and Setup. Under setup, when I click on the drive under SATA hard drive, it shows something like 10GB and nothing more, and I have no options on the screen .....
I connected a dvd drive to my laptop using, a sata to esata cable. my laptop has a ESATA port.
I don't know if you should post some kind of config summary (if yes let me know, I will do it promptly) basically I have a HP DV6t quad edition with an Intel 5 serie chipset, PM55 express chipset (dont really know if it make any sense but still, I will just say state it) so I installed Intel Matrix Storage and when I connect the drive I can see it, but windows 7 does not see it, it's like I didn't plug anything in. [url] also my bios is almost configurable, I don't know why I can change the time, the date, the admin password, the boot order, virtualization, fan on/off that's pretty much it. so what options do I have if I want to make this dvd drive work?
HP Pavilion Dv5-2077cl Entertainment NotebookProduct #: WQ799UA#ABAWindows 7 64-bit
I have been getting a random blue screen popping up every once and a while, that will "dump my physical memory" or something and then reboot itself after like 30 seconds. my hard drive was the reason for these constant errors. So I backed everything up, in preparation of a real crash. I am in the process of ordering a new hard drive from Newegg.com, and I would like to know if it is hard to replace a hard drive in a notebook, or if I should have Geek Squad do it for $50. Also, I dont think I have the Operating system disc that came with my computer, so how do I order that from HP and how much is it?And last but not least, Is there a post or video with instructions on how to install a hard drive and the operating system?
I have a HP 15 Notebook PC with no dvd drive recently I was sent the system recovery cds from HP. I dont have an external dvd drive. What i do have is a Toshiba Satelight laptop with Widows 7 and a good dvd drive. Also I have a 500 GB external hard drive. I was thinking maybe I could copy the disks onto the external harddrive with the Toshiba dvd drive. Then attach the external hard drive to my HP 15 Notebook by usb port and install Hp recovey disks from the external hard drive.
Laptop was working fine with the factory Hitachi HTS541680J9AT00 80gb drive.
I purchased a Samsung HM160HC 160gb drive as it's supposed to be the fastest PATA laptop drive available.
I put it in and the laptop just kept saying "no operating system found" with the XP disk in the drive.
I tried several optical drives and got the same issue with all of them.
I then hooked a USB optical drive up and it wouldn't boot from it.
I removed the internal optical drive and the system then booted from the USB drive and loaded Windows fine.
I just assumed it was a fluke and once Windows was done loading I removed the USB drive, installed the factory internal optical again and turned it on...
"No operating system found".
This is where I'm stuck. If I remove the optical the system boots into Windows fine. There were no issues like this with the other hard drive.
I have tried setting the hard drive as Master, Slave, and Cable Select with no change.
Laptop has the newest BIOS.
Samsung does not offer firmware updates on their hard drives.
I gained a lot of information from the 5315 CPU Upgrade Thread. I'd particularly like to thank BigOzone, Hoggie and Quilty997. There are many others but information from the above formed the basis of my upgrade.
Other information I've collected from other parts in the forum.
The specification of the laptop was as follows.
Acer Aspire 5315 Celeron 550 2.0Ghz (eek) 1gb of Ram Vista Home Basic (double eek) Atheros Wireless Card 80Gb Toshiba Hard Disk
The new Specification is.
Core2Duo T7500 2.2Ghz 800 Mhz Front Side Bus 4Mb Cache 3Gb of Crucial Ram Vista Home Basic (No Choice At the Minute) Intel 4965 AGN Wireless Card 200Gb Hitachi Hard Disk
The CPU Upgrade I won't actually cover, not necessary when there is a fantastic sticky at the top of this forum. The Upgrade took about 15 minutes, but the actual swap took about 5 minutes or so, I was very anal about cleaning the heatsink and applying AS5. I think the biggest scare was the door unerneath, quite tricky to get off and put back on without damaging the tabs.
My main focus is the hard drive swap, whilst maintaining all the eRecovery software. For this I use Acronis True Image Home, I am aware that the trial can be downloaded or users obtain by other means, can I just say BUY IT as it only cost me £17 from Amazon.co.uk and as usual it was cheaper in the US. The biggest reason for buying is that some features are not available in the trial. I also bought a Laptop SATA External Drive Holder and boy was I glad I did......................