Cannot boot Windows on HDD Caddy if OS X Main Drive is Present

[Rectified^]

I got a new 2012 15" Ivy Bridge MBP, and installed my Crucial M4 256GB SSD in place of the stock drive, with Lion running. Today, I got my HDD caddy and swapped in the stock 750GB drive into the optical bay. Both drives were seen by OS X. So far, so good.

Then, I pulled out my handy Windows 7 SP1 installation disc, and using an external enclosure for the removed SuperDrive, proceeded to perform the Boot Camp procedure. Boot Camp inside OS X worked fine -- I got the drivers onto a USB flash drive, it created the BOOTCAMP partition on my optical caddy HDD, and I rebooted to install Windows.

Unfortunately, as I had two drives in the system, Windows for some reason did not want to install to Drive 1 (the caddy HDD), even after I formatted it to NTFS. I looked up the error code, and it seems to have been related either to the use of GPT vs MBR, or because Windows doesn't play nice unless it is Drive 0 during installation.

So, I unplugged my SSD with OS X on it JUST for the Windows install. Of course, it worked with only the caddy HDD in the system. Windows booted, I got Boot Camp drivers installed from my flash drive, and I was good to go.

So I plugged my primary OS X SSD back in, and restarted. OS X boots fine, but when I choose Windows, it says that it can't find the boot drive and to insert a boot disc.

So I guess I'm stuck. Anyone have any idea why this is happening? Anybody Boot Camping with Windows in the optical bay caddy on a totally separate drive from the OS X drive?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Rectified^]

Workaround and Explanation...

Well, I didn't solve the issue, but I managed to install Win7 via a workaround.

The issue is almost certainly that Windows doesn't like being on anything but disk 0. I redid everything, installing Windows via Boot Camp to my Disk 0 SSD with a 40GB partition. I then partitioned my Caddy HDD into equal sizes for OS X and Windows. This setup successfully works, but it's clunky as I have both OSses split on two drives, with four partitions total, instead of just two.

 

[murphychris]

Apple's instructions don't account for two drives in a MBP, but the rules apply the same. Page 6:

If you have a Mac Pro with more than one internal disk and you want to install Boot Camp on a disk that isn’t in the first hard drive bay, remove the drives in the lower numbered bays. You can reinstall the drives after you install Boot Camp.

So probably what's going on now is you've got two disks with two MBRs and two boot loaders and multiple operating systems. So you need to specify what layout you want, SSD exclusively for Mac OS and HDD exclusively for Windows?

 

[pesos]

Well, I didn't solve the issue, but I managed to install Win7 via a workaround.

The issue is almost certainly that Windows doesn't like being on anything but disk 0. I redid everything, installing Windows via Boot Camp to my Disk 0 SSD with a 40GB partition. I then partitioned my Caddy HDD into equal sizes for OS X and Windows. This setup successfully works, but it's clunky as I have both OSses split on two drives, with four partitions total, instead of just two.

This is actually ideal for performance reasons. You could just leave the caddy HDD as a single partition for data shared between both OSes if you prefer.

 

[The Afroman]

I'm in the SAME boat! Seriously.. i just installed Windows on the second HDD in a caddy and as soon as i plugg my main drive back in BOOM no more windows boot. this seems silly to me.. there HAS to be a way to do this..

 

[Lebanese]

Around 6 years later, i'm facing the same problem and in need of a solution