Second HD not seen until after UEFI boot

rvcjew said:

What happens if you swap the sata cables for the hard drives at the drive ends while the pc is off then boot into uefi again does it now only see the second drive which is now the first in its list?

I tried something similar months ago, though not this exact scenario. I swapped the cable to HD 2 at the mobo end to use SATA port 2 (was SATA 1). The idea was to see if SATA 1 was not working properly, though the fact that HD 2 was fine after booting argued against a port malfunction.

However, trying another SATA port for HD 2 didn't help, and actually made things worse. When I connected the second HD to SATA2, the drive was still not seen by BIOS. Worse, it was not seen by Windows once I was booted. I received no error messages, but the drive simply was not there. If TVeblen's suggestion doesn't pan out, I'll try your suggestion.

rvcjew said:

When you are cloning your drives are you also taking the drive signatures too?

I imagine so, though I don't know enough about drive mechanics to tell you exactly what happened.

The first clone (via Casper 8) was of the entire HD 1. This is how the UEFI System Partition got created on HD 2. Subsequent clones (also via Casper 8) have been of just the primary Win7 partition following the ESP on HD 1 to the primary Win7_alt partition following the ESP on HD 2. Subsequent clones, thus, did not affect the ESP partition or the data partition following Win7_alt on HD 2. So, the ESP on HD 2 is untouched since the first clone. The second HD is larger than HD 1, so I would imagine that Casper reflected this in the drive signature on HD 2, but this is pure guess work on my part.

Thank you for your thoughts. Somewhere, there is an answer, I think.

I am very appreciative to the kind folks who have endeavored to help me with this issue, and I wanted to check in to keep the thread somewhat alive, in hopes that others, in addition to myself, may benefit.

I don't have a lot to report, yet, but I'm looking to try some of these suggestions in the next few days. I will report back on my experience, however it turns out.

rvcjew said:

Have you also tried resetting your uefi to optimized defaults it sounds like it may also be just confused if it will not see the disks on other sata ports. It may just need a reset to probably detect everything.

Honestly, rvcjew, I don't know what "resetting your uefi" entails, or how to do it. There is nothing like that option in the BIOS setup, nothing that I could find in the Lenovo forums or documentation, and Googling same left me more uncertain than ever.

My uninformed take on the whole matter is this: While the ideas behind UEFI are solid, and while there are UEFI standards, implementation of those standards is another matter, entirely. How each vendor implements the standards, and which features they choose to implement and which they choose to ignore, are largely up to them. I'm guessing that things will settle down as the years pass, but who knows?

In the meantime, we are stuck in the early days of a new technology. I've got multiple parties with which to contend (Lenovo, American Megatrends, Microsoft). Some folks on the Lenovo site describe Lenovo's implementation of UEFI as "wonky." Maybe there could or should be, but isn't, a "reset UEFI" option in the BIOS setup?

Again, thank you all, and I'll let you know whatever I learn.

You can search "uefi load defaults" on Google and see how on others, may give you an idea where to look.

rvcjew said:

...I would thy these steps after loading defaults, saving and exiting and rebooting.

Thanks, rcvjew.

This is a progress report, of sorts. No, more like a status report. No progress toward solution, but some new data points, at least.

As you suggested a while back, I swapped SATA cables between the two HDs. The results did not change. That is, the system booted from the drive connected to SATA0, and did not see the drive connected to SATA1 as a viable boot drive, not in BIOS Setup/Startup options, and not in the F12 boot menu. Selecting the SATA1 drive in the Windows Boot menu went nowhere, eventually restarting and leaving the only working choice of booting from the SATA0 drive. Once booted, however, the SATA1 drive was alive and well.

From this, I conclude that:

• My Lenovo TS140 BIOS just does not want to recognize a HD connected to SATA1 as a valid UEFI boot device, and yet is fine with the drive once it's booted. I do not know if I would have the same issue if I were booting conventional MBR drives, rather than via GPT/UEFI drives.
• The clone of Win7 I made using Casper makes a perfectly valid, bootable drive (as long as it's connected to SATA0).

I have one more thing to try: Lenovo has a BIOS firmware update available, one version newer than what I have now.

But, I'm running out of time and patience. If flashing the BIOS doesn't make the second drive available as a boot device, I will probably give up what I'm trying to do with GPT/UEFI drives and look for another backup-boot strategy. At least, until Lenovo fixes its apparently glitchy BIOS-boot process.

Thank you again, one and all, for your thoughts and suggestions. I will pass along any new developments.