[M18X R2] - Hdd hang issue

[colinator]

Hello,

My M18X R2 seems to have a weird issue which I am unable to figure out. Sometimes during boot or when resuming the laptop from sleep, I only get a black screen and nothing happens.

The HDD activity led remains on constantly. Sometimes it also happens during windows boot but it will continue however after a couple of minutes but every time I run into this issue, the HDD led remain constantly on. Its like the HDD is hanging for some reason.

If the machine has booted into windows, it will run fine, the HDD works fine as well. till either a reboot or sleep.

After taking apart the laptop several times to troubleshoot, I noticed that this only happens to the drive that is connected in the HDD caddy with the ribbon cable. I still have my SSD in the optical bay connected. As soon as I remove the hdd caddy, the issue disappears (but then I am missing a disk). Windows boots normal (and fast) and sleep goes fine too.

If I swap the 2 disks around, the issue remains at the hdd caddy so I basically ruled out the disks.

At first I thought its a faulty ribbon cable however, the MSATA port also has an issue.... It detects the MSATA drive correctly but for some reason, installing windows on it fails every time. I can either create a GPT partition but the installer stays stuck at 0% or even the partitioning fails. The drive itself works in another machine.

SMART and the Dell diagnostics are not showing any issue so I am a bit lost as to where to look now to resolve the issue.

I am running a unlocked bios A11 currently, not sure if reflashing would help or not.

Hope someone is able to recognize the issue and can point me in the right direction.

Thanks