Why doesn't this work reliably?

"Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing." (granfury)
03/08/2016 at 16:49 • Filed to: None

I don’t really use the optical drive on my early-2008 MacBook Pro often enough to justify its current inclusion inside of the machine so I decided to put a hard drive in its place. The main drive was replaced with an SSD and has really given this machine a new lease on life. I put the old HD into a tray that connected the SATA drive to the ATAPI port on the logic board (see the image above). It appears to work OK, but sometimes the drives (one OS X partition and another for Windows7) dismount and can’t be remounted without a reboot. I’m still trying to get the Win7 partition to be bootable again after an hour of running CHKDSK; it is accessible via Parallels but no longer as a bootable drive.

So, why is the use of a simple drive tray causing so many problems? I can leave the machine overnight and the drives in that tray don’t dismount, so it’s not an issue of it timing out. The drive worked perfectly when it was the primary drive in the computer and seems to be operating just fine in an external case, but I’d like to be able to put that extra space inside the computer to use, and a secondary drive seems like the perfect solution.

DISCUSSION (4)

Mercedes Streeter > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
03/08/2016 at 17:02

I would wager that it’s how OS X handles partitions. It likely “knows” it’s a MacBook, and therefore should really only have a single hard drive.

Honestly, try installing rEFInd to the Mac. If successful, you should be able to have up to three OS on the system, and none of the Operating Systems will know of each other, just read the other OS as a taken partition.

http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/

Echo51 > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
03/08/2016 at 17:08

OSX version? I see mentions of 10.8.3 and forward breaking optibay HDD installs... https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4895074…

Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. > Echo51
03/08/2016 at 17:27

Thanks for the info.I’m currently running the latest version of OS X, 10.11.3. SMC is up to the latest version for the machine, namely 1.27f3. I can’t tell which EFI version I have as the firmware download page ( https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201518 ) doesn’t list such an option for my 15" machine, only SMC updates.

edu-petrolhead > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
03/09/2016 at 11:14

I have one exactly like the one on your photo on my Thinkpad. I don’t know about MacBooks, but as far as I know Thinkpads’ motherboards and BIOSes are prepared to deal with an extra HDD on the optical disk by. Mine works like a charm in Linux for more than 3 years now.