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I have DELL Inspiron N7110 and recently bought Caddy Module Tray Adapter and placed it into my laptop. When I turn my computer on everything works fine, but it boots from the hard drive that came with my laptop. I can't boot from the hard drive that is in the Caddy Module Adapter. Tried to F12 on startup, but there is only shows Boot from HDD. I can't choose HDDs there.

Help appreciated!

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  • Look in to UEFI(BIOS), there should be detail setting of boot devices.
    – week
    Commented Sep 3, 2013 at 20:34
  • @week I have no idea what UEFI is. Could you please explain?
    – Dilshod
    Commented Sep 4, 2013 at 14:26

1 Answer 1

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This machine is relatively new and EFI based.

It will only display a list of bootable drives that are actually bootable.

Try booting from a CD/DVD/USB etc. and installing on to this drive and then you should get the ability to boot from the drive.

On some other machines, I have noticed that it will only list one drive as bootable no matter how many you have - The Bios/EFI treat "hard disk" as an option and you have to configure the priority of disks in a separate menu.

The last thing I can suggest/think of is if you have installed an OS on it already, the active parition/boot code may be on the primary drive and the menu was just reprogrammed to boot from the other disk.

I know I haven't really given much info to help you actually solve this issue, but this should kick you in the right direction - please comment back if you need any further help and I can tailor this answer better.

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  • My Old HDD has windowd 7 in it and I am trying to install Windows 8 on new SSD(which is in caddy). When I started installing windows 8 I could see that SSD drive in the list. I chose that and it did copying files and trying to restart to continue Windows installation. Then I can't boot from SSD drive. Just for installing windows I could take out my old HDD, but will it work after words or still need to pool out the HDD all the time to switch Windows?
    – Dilshod
    Commented Sep 4, 2013 at 13:33
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    I would pull out the other hard drive, install windows on the SSD and then make sure it all works before putting the regular drive back in... After you have done that, if it boots to 7, go to the BIOS/EFI and see if you can change the hard drive boot order. If you can't, swap the location of SSD for the HDD (if you no longer need to boot in to windows).
    – William Hilsum
    Commented Sep 4, 2013 at 16:15
  • I tried to take out the old HDD that came with laptop and put the new SSD Drive. I was able to install Windows, but I am still not able to choose the HDD in the Caddy.
    – Dilshod
    Commented Sep 6, 2013 at 3:27
  • On my HP Pavillon G6: with SSD in the main slot, I had to wipe the Caddy HDD MBR to prevent booting from it.
    – younes0
    Commented Nov 19, 2014 at 9:08

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