Gen8 2.5" HDD in the ODD bay discussion

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Ran into the same issue.  The way I got around it in my case (Windows Server 2012 Std, although I guess this would work with any Windows OS of Win7 vintage or newer) was to create a special MicroSD card and using BCDEDIT and some trial and error create a new BCD store pointing to the drive in the ODD bay - this allowed me to keep the controller on AHCI mode.  This works using the "USB" boot option in the BIOS, but means you cannot have any other bootable USB devices connected (because seemingly they take priority).  But there's a way around that too - as the USB3 port is not supported at boot time, if you have any such USB devices, just make sure they're on one of the USB3 ports and as long as you don't need them until you're booted into your OS, you're good to go.

 

Appreciate that this isn't quite the same scenario, but thought it might help others on the board.

I think some people have said that by using the drives in AHCI mode the HDD temps don't get passed through to the motherboard properly so the system fan runs at around 36% minimum (quite loud) rather than around the 6% mark (nice and quiet) like it would when not running in AHCI mode - can you confirm if this is what you've found as well?

[TheBiggerMan]

I think some people have said that by using the drives in AHCI mode the HDD temps don't get passed through to the motherboard properly so the system fan runs at around 36% minimum (quite loud) rather than around the 6% mark (nice and quiet) like it would when not running in AHCI mode - can you confirm if this is what you've found as well?

 

Yes, you are right, this is seemingly a wide-spread issue and is a downside of the approach I took - my fans run around 36%-40%.  My hope is that this is fixed in a future firmware release...

[skelzer]

Oops "page not found"

 

Seems pretty pricey for such a small part####

 

Yeah, oops, sorry about that... here's the right link:

http://h20141.www2.hp.com/Hpparts/

 

FYI, P@ck3tL0ss is correct... this is NOT the right bracket part: 460014-001

 

The correct part is:  532475-001   

Optical drive bracket - 9.5mm slimline form factor                                                

[Bluedeep]

I founded a molex! So you could connect a Y molex cable instead using FDD cable

[Therealjmc]

OK – I’ve put together some instructions for the board. 

 

[...]

I hope this is helpful!

 

 

Thanks! I used it yesterday to get my testmachine up and running but this way it won't work with truecrypt since truecrypt won't encrypt/decrypt if you boot from another drive.

 

I setup grub2 on my microsd card which is chainloading the truecrypt bootloader. In case someone else will stumble upon this issue.

 

[hoxbox382b]

I pretty much copied  your setup. 9.5 mm caddy and bought little bracket from HP itself trying to install an SSD drive. Now I'm waiting for some screws to come to put it together (got some generic laptop and PC screws coming from eBay). 

 

2 questions:

1) Did you use ""MX714 Floppy FDD to Sata Power Converter Cable"? 

2) It's slimline sata on the caddy and regular sata on the other end. Did you have to use Slimline SATA to SATA Adapter with Power?

 

I got the last 2 items on the way and just waiting for it to fit all together. 

 

 

This is of course not "supported", but it worked fine for me 

 

I used a 9.5mm caddy i got off ebay for under $12.. shows up as 5th HDD on the B120i w/o any modifications.   If you don't already have the HP DVD for this unit, then you will be missing the small metal bracket that latches the caddy in place (duct tape to the rescue).  

 

I also tested it on a P222 and created RAID 5.  But you mostly likely will use small SSD here and larger SATA in the main bays, so the including this bay into the RAID 5 is not really as big of an issue.

 

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Edited October 24, 2013 by hoxbox382b

[m1cky]

Hi,

 

new to the Hp Gen8 Microserver..

 

Trying to get it to boot from the ODD port, went with the the USB boot option while running Hyper-V 2012 R2

 

get to bcdedit /store ?:\boot\bcd /set hypervisorlaunchtype auto and it says

 

The boot configuration data store could not be opened.
The system cannot find the file specified.

 

Everything else worked.. except for the final command.. :/

[m1cky]

Seems like it will work in legacy mode for me.. Not running a SSD, so hopefully should be fine..

[TheBiggerMan]

Hi,

 

new to the Hp Gen8 Microserver..

 

Trying to get it to boot from the ODD port, went with the the USB boot option while running Hyper-V 2012 R2

 

get to bcdedit /store ?:\boot\bcd /set hypervisorlaunchtype auto and it says

 

The boot configuration data store could not be opened.

The system cannot find the file specified.

 

Everything else worked.. except for the final command.. :/

 

m1cky,

 

You're quite right... a typo from me...

 

Should have been:

bcdedit /store ?:\boot\bcd /set {default} hypervisorlaunchtype auto

 

(I missed out the {default} bit).

 

- TheBiggerMan

Edited November 26, 2013 by TheBiggerMan

[m1cky]

m1cky,

 

You're quite right... a typo from me...

 

Should have been:

bcdedit /store ?:\boot\bcd /set {default} hypervisorlaunchtype auto

 

(I missed out the {default} bit).

 

- TheBiggerMan

 

Thank you worked like a charm..