The existing 10 Gb hard drive (a Fujitsu MPC3102AT)on my Compaq was almost full & getting v noisy, so I decided to replace it with a larger 80 Gb unit before it failed. The machine only has 1 HD slot so I connected a new WD 800jb drive to the PCI card as a temporary solution & cloned the drive. Afterward, no problems & the machine booted & operated OK, with the new drive established as the boot drive.
I then removed the old drive & moved the new drive to the motherboard IDE connector (& removed the PCI card). The machine refused to boot & went into a constant reboot sequence. As well, I had trouble getting into BIOS, as the machine wanted me to acknowledge the changed hardware state before it would open the BIOS to allow config changes to be made & often required several boot attempts before I could get in & update the BIOS. Even then, regardless of any config changes made in BIOS, the machine would not boot unless I restored it to the config that was in place when the new drive was cloned.
Over the weekend, I’ve tried every permutation I can think of to get it to work: reloaded system S/W, swapping HD positions, changing jumper settings on the hard drives & changing out the ribbon connectors, but it will only boot if the cloned drive is on the PCI board & a drive is connected & powered on the motherboard primary IDE. When I remove the drive from the Primary IDE cable & use only the PCI card IDE connection I get a BIOS message that “no fixed Hard Drive was detected”, so I’m guessing that the motherboard needs to see a hard drive on the primary IDE.
Thinking that the problem was that machine was still looking for some files on the original 10 gb drive, I tested this by removing it & putting in an old 2 gb drive I had in a long retired Mac. With the Mac drive (not even reformatted from its Mac days) in place on the motherboard primary IDE cable & the cloned drive on the PCI card , the machine boots just fine, so it seems my only issue is that for some reason I am locked into a config that wants the boot drive on the PCI card, but wants to see any drive (but not the boot drive!!!) powered & connected on the motherboard primary IDE cable.
While not the end of the world, this is most frustrating as: the old Mac drive is also noisy, I don’t need a 2nd HD or want to have a hard drive sitting outside of the case.
Any ideas on what is wrong & how to correct are much appreciated.