Dell InsydeH20 BIOS freezes when I try to Save changes and Exit

Hello,

I have a Dell Inspiron 7520 (i7 processor) laptop. I recently updated the BIOS to A13 and replaced the DVD drive with a caddy for a second hard drive.

I can boot into the OS on this drive by tapping F12 on boot up and changing the boot order to the DVD drive.

However I cannot make that permanent. There is another BIOS menu where you can change the boot order and then Save and Exit so it will always boot from the DVD drive Sata connector. However when I try to do that the BIOS screen freezes and I have to force a reboot by powering off and on again. When it comes back it boots as usual into the Hard Drive Sata connector.

1. The "HardDrive" is an SSD and the "DVD drive" is a HDD.
2. I tried resetting the BIOS settings to defaults and when I did that the only boot options were Harddrive, Network and Network so I did not try to save that change.
3. Both SSD and HDD have Win 10 installed with Legacy BIOS/MBR and not GPT/EFI.
4. When I look in the BIOS it says the CMOS battery is working normally.
5. I can boot from the drive in the DVD drive bay but cannot make it default to that drive at every boot.

Any ideas?

Cheers,

If the BIOS won't allow that change then set it up as a "dual boot" system. When you boot you will have the option of setting the default OS (drive) and also have the option to boot from the other OS (drive).

I have a dual boot, I used to have Win 10 and Win 7 but now have two Win 10 installations (one is primary and the other I only use with my recording studio)..
My main Win 10 is the "C" drive and the second one is the "E" drive.

From a Command Prompt (run as Administrator) Enter the following (substitute "E" for whatever the DVD drive letter is).
bcdedit /export c:\oldstore
bcdedit /createstore c:\emptystore
bcdedit /import c:\emptystore /clean
bcdboot c:\windows
bcdboot e:\windows

Thanks @fireberd

Here is a screenshot of my two disks.


Disk 1 is the HDD attached in the DVD drive bay.

I might be wrong but does the OS boot from the System Reserved Partition? See how they are separate from the OS partition in each? Which letter should I use or will this work in my partition layout?

Cheers,

There is a MS reserved partition between the System Partition a and the OS partition that Disk Manager doesn't show.
As you can see on the first drive, system partition is big (1G) as it may contain some Dell tools (how much is in use?)

Why do you want to make the HDD the default drive as it is much slower than the SSD?

Swap the two drives and the HDD will be the default.

Hello!

Ideally I would like to have Windows dual booting with Linux on the same hard drive.

I upgraded my Win 10 HDD to an SDD recently so that leaves the HDD as available and I'd like to experiment with installing Linux on the HDD first.

The System Reserved Partition on Disk 0 is much bigger than the SRP on Disk 1 because I used Macrium to size it that way as it was only 50MB and I think that was stopping me being able to make a system image backup from that Disk 0 (SSD) using the built in Windows (7) backup tool.

Instead of physically swapping the disks I'd rather understand why the BIOS freezes when I try to save the DVD drive bay as the default to boot from. (Also I nearly had to totally dismantle the whole laptop to get the dvd caddy SATA connector to connect to the motherboard and don't want to have to spend an hour unscrewing everything again!

Any advice about my BIOS situation or can you advise me about those BCD commands? I don't want to break anything.

Cheers,

I think none of us (on Tenforums) would be able to explain the freezing BIOS as it has nothing to do with Win 10.
As it is a Dell and BIOS issue maybe someone on Dell forums can help you, but even there, as the caddy isn't genuine Dell product, I don't think you will ever have an answer.
fireberd is the is the Dell Guru in Tenforum, but I don't think he has an answer.