Thinkpad L420 L520 allow to boot from HDD1 (caddy)

[otheos]

Hi all,
the Thinkpad L420 already has a mod with the whitelist removed, thanks for this.

However the L420 will not boot from the caddy, if the CD-Rom is swapped with one.

There is a very good reason to swap the CD-ROM for a caddy with an additional HDD or even better and SSD. This caddy connects to a SATA3 port, like the main HDD/SSD.

While the L420 and the L520 have a miniPCI connection for their 3G modem that also takes a mSATA SSD from which you can boot, this connections is SATA2 only, and sadly for an SSD that can perform faster, this is a quite limiting.

So you wound ideally want to install a second SSD in the caddy and replace the optical unit, but then you cannot boot from it.

I have tried many caddies, including Lenovo's ultracaddy for the T430, but it is certainly a Bios limitation (that the T-models don't have).

In the BIOS the option to boot from HDD1 is clearly missing. HDD0 is there (the main disk), HDD2 is there (the mSATA) and additional SATA ports (the external, HDD3, which is also SATA3 but cannot really have something permanently hanging from there). There is even a HDD4 and HDD5 although it is not clear what they represent, but neither is the caddy.

There is only a CD-Rom option that works great when the optical drive is connected and you can boot from it, but not when you replace it with a caddy.

It would be great if we could boot from this.

Thank you very much.

[xoitx]

Hi, L420 user myself here.
Did you manage to do it?
Also what other mods have you done to your laptop?