Hp Z420 Help! Please?

I recently purchased a refurbished HP z420. I was able to clone the 1tb drive to a 240gb SSD successfully but here is just one of the issues:

I tried to add an additional drive to the system and it would not allow the computer to boot. It just stalled. I tried both a HDD and an SSD drive. neither would work. I looked at the board diagram and it wasn't clear where I should be plugging the SATA cable. I attached a photo of the SATA ports. They are all enabled in the bios as far as I can tell.

The board diagram on the inside of the case doesn't even show the 2 SATA ports in black. The red cable is the cloned SSD drive. I disconnected the DVD drive because even that seemed to keep the system from booting.

I think originally both the HDD that came with it and the DVD drive were both plugged in to the black SATA ports, but replacing them in the same slots seem to prevent the system from booting.

I really have to put more storage in this but not sure how to do it.

thank you in advance.
Suzi

 

i ran into ( possibly ) this same problem with Dell computers. i bought a refurb Dell computer, wanted to add a 2nd hard drive to it... i added the 2nd SATA hard drive, but the computer did not see it. i went into the BIOS, and each SATA connector [ there were 6 of them ] on the motherboard had an on/off option. i thought, well, i might want to connect more stuff later, so i turned on, in the BIOS, all 6 SATA connectors. well that was a mistake, the computer would not boot because it was looking for something attached to all turned ON SATA connectors. well, had to get my readers out so i could actually see the printing on the motherboard, and figured out the MB names for the 2 SATA connectors that had the hard drives attached to them, turned OFF the other four, and then the computer booted just fine and it saw the 2nd hard drive. i do not know if HP computers act the same, but it is worth a look in the BIOS to see how HP set them up.
good luck with it. i don't have any other brilliant ideas at the moment.

 

I really appreciate your input. it never occurred to me that this could be an issue. It gives me something to look at. I had another issue - also kinda weird.
I plugged a SSD drive into my USB port (SSD in a case - external storage) . I was looking for a file that I had backed up. found the file but could not get it to print. I had just printed something so I knew the printer worked...............then noticed my internet connection had stopped. wasn't sure why but then remembered I had a similar problem with this computer earlier that when I booted the system but had that drive plugged in - it wouldn't boot. So I unplugged the rive and that restored my internet connection which allowed my network printer to print.

lots of little strange things with this system. I really hope to get them all ironed out. I'll start by looking at the bios and see if I can figure out the SATA port names. the one I referenced here isn't listed that I could find (in the manual or board diagram.

thanks for your insight. that could be it. I'll find out.

 

Bookmark this page https://support.hp.com/us-en/product/hp-z420-workstation/5225033/manuals
Make use of the chat option at the bottom right of the screen.

 

The diagram shows the black ports as #15, they also show them as 0 & 1 - for that reason I'd plug the boot drive on the zero port, on the of the corner of the board.
Now, the other drives you are adding, are they system / bootable drives or just data / blank?
Will it boot with just the cloned SSD? Also how long did you wait for it to boot? Might take a while to find everything...

 

The drives I'm adding used to be boot drives but now I'm just using them for data.
It will boot from just the SSD drive plugged into the black SATA port. I just used the DVD drive - plugged into the other black port. so that's good. I plugged my wifi adapter into the USB port on the back and the USB data (SSD in drive enclosure) in the front. so far it hasn't kicked off my wifi connection. so far..........

my next step is to plug in my data backup drive from my dead system. not sure which port to plug it into - but I can experiment. More memory is one the way. hopefully by Monday or Tuesday.

thank you I'll keep working on it.