Swapping the boot drive on my ThinkPad T430 took me 5 hours for what I thought was a 20 minute job

I decided to put an SSD in my old T430 last Sunday. Figured just clone the HDD, swap the caddy, good to go. But the cloning software kept freezing at 67% every single time. After two hours of that nonsense, I realized the SATA cable in the caddy was loose. Fixed it with electrical tape and the clone finished in 10 minutes. Has anyone else had a cheap caddy ruin a simple upgrade like this?

2 comments

2 Comments

hayes.elliot10d ago

Man oh man that reminds me of my buddy Mike. He got a cheap caddy off Amazon for his old Dell and spent a whole Saturday troubleshooting why his new SSD wasn't showing up. Turns out the caddy's power connector was slightly bent and only made contact if he propped the laptop up on a stack of books at a weird angle. He said he felt like a total idiot when he finally spotted it with a flashlight.

nancyd8510d ago

Honestly, that loose cable trick is the kind of thing that makes you want to throw the whole laptop out the window. Tbh, I've had a similar issue with a cheap caddy where the drive just wasn't seated right, and it took me way too long to figure out it wasn't a software problem. Did you try any other cloning software before you found the cable issue, or were you just banging your head against the wall with that one? Ngl, the T430 is a tank but those third party parts can be such a gamble.