OT Hard drive problems

[JonMitchell]

I bought myself a seagate 120gig hd to replace the maxtor in my dell b\c I was getting disk warning messages on startup. Well I threw the seagate in there, as a second drive (slave), formated it, used norton ghost to make an exact copy of the maxtor. I then set the seagate to master, changed it to the first plug on the strip going to the motherboard, and unhooked the maxtor. Didn't fly, I couldn't boot windows, wouldn't even allow me into the bios.
So just for giggles I hooked the maxtor back up as the slave and the seagate as the primary drive and everything booted fine, I'm under the impression this setup is booting windows from the seagate (being the master drive) I might be making the incorrect assumption that the pc always boots from the master drive, maybe Im missing something here. Any help would be fantastic.
Thanks
Adam

And while im on the topic, does anyone else use a second pc for audio and run it into PT via SPDIF? It seems I loose some sound quality, I was thinking the SPDIF runs out a digital signal into PT and it never gets convereted, I don't understand why it would loose volume or pick up noise.

[albee1952]

Can't help you on the drive problem but as for SPDIF from another PC; some PC SPDIF like SoundBlaster stuff is really not very good. I bought a Soundblaster live (years ago) because it came with SPDIF...turns out that the daughter card with the SPDIF jacks converted to analog before it went to the main card where it was converted back to digital. It ended up sounding about as good as the mini jack analog input. If you are indeed using a pro-quality SPDIF connection at both ends, maybe you need a high quality digital cable. Regular RCA cables are sort of okay for short(3-5')runs.

[Booyah]

Did you forget to set the HD jumpers?

use CS (cable select) on both drives if you have a problem, then connect the master drive to the end of cable.

[JonMitchell]

Yeah I can get the pc to boot up with the new HD as the master and the old as the slave. When I take the old HD out the pc wont boot. Even with the new HD on the master end (jumpers set to cable select) and with it set on master (at the jumpers). The only thing I can figure is that norton isnt making an 'exact copy' onto the new HD and somehow the old HD is involved in booting the computer. Either that or something needs to be configured in windows to boot off a new harddrive, maybe drivers?

As for the SPDIF I am using a soundblaster external rig that links to an internal card, and Im using some cheap cables. Im sure neither one is helping by situation....
Thanks for the help so far, if anyone has any more insight throw some my way!

[Booyah]

Maybe your right, Ghost might not be copying the entire boot record, whats the error? does it say Missing Operating system or NTLDR missing or just hang there?

boot XP CD, select R for recovery console, once in the black dos lookin screens it should ask for a Admin password if it finds windows exists, then diskpart to verify your pariitions exist, if they do then run fixboot and fixmbr from the console to auto repair the bootrecord and boot.ini.

Good luck.