Booting issue after adding a second hard drive

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I am in the process of cloning some hard drives for a mac lab, but I haven't been very successful. Occasionally I get a hard drive in, the main drive boots, and I use CCC to do the job. But more often then not I get either the blinking folder, or a circle with a slash through it at the gray screen. :Grimmace: I've tried every possible configuration I can think of for the jumpers on the hard drives, and I have tried attaching them to both IDE channels. Is there trick to getting this to work consistently? Thanks for any info.
 
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One has to be Master and the other Slave. Once you got the OS drive as master and it boots the machine dont change it.
 
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I have done that. I've even go so far as to use the second IDE channel and still have it set to slave. Do I just have bad drives? They worked when they were pulled.
 
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Your Mac's Specs
MBP - 15in, 2.66ghz, 8gb RAM, 2x GPU, 320gb HDD
I am in the process of cloning some hard drives for a mac lab, but I haven't been very successful. Occasionally I get a hard drive in, the main drive boots, and I use CCC to do the job. But more often then not I get either the blinking folder, or a circle with a slash through it at the gray screen. :Grimmace: I've tried every possible configuration I can think of for the jumpers on the hard drives, and I have tried attaching them to both IDE channels. Is there trick to getting this to work consistently? Thanks for any info.

Make sure that the pins for the original device are set as they were prior OS X is very particular in the way that it searches for bootable partitions. If you've already done this use your OS cd to boot. Also, make sure that the all pins are making full contact, a bent pin will definitely cause you some troubles!
 
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Well what should I do if I can get the original one to boot? Aside from setting the second drive to slave, there shouldn't be any issues then. The drives are all alike and the slave setting is actually without jumpers.
 
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How are you connecting the drives?
You may have a damaged cable.

I've seen a lot of intermittent problems with shorter cable and those that get handled a lot. Wires do break inside. Try a new cable or add a magnet (called a "Toroid") to the one you have - you're maxing out the data transfer speed and you have to have perfect cables.
 
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That thought hadn't occurred to me. I will try different cables and let you know. Thanks.
 
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Sorry it took so long to reply. The cable did the trick, honestly I've never had an IDE cable go bad so it wasn't something I looked for. Thanks again!
 

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