Adding 2nd drive to a B1500 but it remains undetected

[chutetearer2013]

System: Asus ExpertBook
Battery or AC: Both
Model: B1500CEAE
Frequency of occurrence: always
Reset OS: all drivers and bios up-to-date
Screenshot or video: none yet
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Detailed description：
Hello,
I bought this PC a few days ago and have not been able to get the BIOS/OS to recognize any hard-disks I have tried to add to the system. This additional harddrive was a main criteria for me in selecting this hardware.
I have tried two 2.5" mechanical drives (Hitachi and Seagate) as well as a Kingston 2.5" Sata SSD and none of them are detected by the BIOS, nor the OS ofcourse.
What further steps do I have to undertake to get this PC up and running with its factory M.2 SSD and the added 2.5" Sata drive?
Please note that all drivers and the bios are up-to-date and that all three drives work perfectly in other systems. Also, the mechanical drives do seem to spin up at bootup but remain invisible to the bios and operating system.
My best guess is a defective connector cable that was supplied with the caddy and its eight screws. Another culprit could be the motherboard sata connector. I have not found any options in the BIOS allowing me to change anything related to above.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks for reading me - chute

[chutetearer2013]

Hello Falcon_ASUS,
Thank you for your response and sorry for my late reply. Tried it and that destroyed windows to the extent that it was not recoverable after the "Disable Intel Volume Management Device (VMD) technology". Not a big thing as I took an image of the drive before starting the B1500 for the first time. The case was also escalated to level 2 support in spain and here their response:
"Una vez escalado su caso internamente, nos informan que si lo desea, podemos solicitar presupuesto a nuestro SAT para hacer el Upgrade el disco duro hdd o ssd del tipo sata3 ya que unicamente podemos garantizar el funcionamiento del equipo con el siguiente disco duro:  19200-41620700   SATA3 MN1000S 1TB 5400R 2.5'    WD/WD10SPZX-80Z10T2/04.01A04    HDD".
In short, they wanted to sell me above mentionned disk as, according to them, this disk is the only one they can guarantee will work.
I eventually opened the laptop again and cleaned/reseated the disk-to-motherboard cable, and to my astonishment (and relief), the disk was recognized by the bios. After re-configuring the bios settings to the factory values and restoring the initial image to the M.2 SSD drive, all is fine now and the SATA drive works perfectly (dual Linux/Win11).
Thank you for reading me - chute
ps: this thread can be closed now

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