Need help with SATA hard drives and boot up after cloning.

Factual Questions
1

I have several Western Digital WD1500AHFD - 00RAR5 hard drives. The WD 1500

I have cloned and swapped then as “C” drives many times on my MSI mother board machine with XP-PRO.

No I have also brand new WD740ADFD - 00NLR5 drives. I bought this.

I formatted and copied a few pictures and a page of text to it and I could open and see that. I then deleted those things and used the same cloning CD I always use (HD Clone Pro) and all went fine including the verification step.

I install it as “C” or leave it as “F” and my system won’t boot. I get an "media cable disconnect **** " type error while BIOS is trying to run.

Do I need to put a jumper on one or the other or both?

The choices are:
SSC_SEL
PM2
OPT1
OPT2

No jumpers came with the drives and I can’t find anything about it in the book on both my mother boards. I have tried on MSI – see above and also on my LINUX (Ubuntu 8.10) ASUS A8N-SLI Premium mother board in that machine. Tried to clone my Ubuntu which I have done before with IDE drives.

These drives are SATA…

Any help? What can be wrong? Are they not compatible with those mother boards? I be totally cornfussed…

Help…

2

Just a WAG here: I replaced all my IDE drives with SATA. When I boot up now, there is a warning message about no harddrive detected. It will boot up and run perfectly, though. So it seems the BIOS expects some IDE device there. Maybe yours simply won’t boot without an IDE drive present? Do you have the latest BIOS?

3

You didn’t actually give the MB model anywhere that I can see. I haven’t been able to afford a hard drive since SATA came out, so I can only tell you this. Some of the older SATA controllers have compatibility problems with the newer SATA drives. Also maybe the BIOS isn’t set up correctly to boot from the SATA or boot from SATA isn’t even an available option in your BIOS. Did you open the BIOS and set it to boot from the SATA drive? I can’t help you about jumpers.

4

I would guess that because the drive is a different size you are going to have to Install Windows on it, not just clone from the other one.

5

Made sure boot up was correct in BIOS.

Had worked before on 150 GIG SATA drives. Just these 74 GIG ones giving me trouble. Has to be something simple… I just did a fast format and saved stuff to it and then opened them. Worked fine.

Hope I don’t have to do an install before I can clone it…

Gonna try some more stuff.

Keep ideas coming…

Thanks