Problem booting from drive

[motorollin]

Also please give details about how they are connected and jumpered. It may be that the internal drive is slave and the external drive is master, and some drives don't like being slave without a master connected.

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moto

[motorollin]

scuzzb494 wrote:
Interested, why if he was booting from just one hard drive that the file system would matter.

If the internal hard disk uses anything other than FFS for its file system then the chosen filesystem (e.g. SFS, PFS, AFS) *must* be installed in the RDB of at least one installed disk. If it is installed in the external disk then either drive will boot since the filesystem will be available and the partitions will be readable. Remove that external drive and you remove the filesystem, and the partitions are no longer readable.

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moto

[motorollin]

scuzzb494 wrote:
More likely one is a simple copy as a back up. If that were the case the file system would also have been copied. If not he simply needs to copy this over from the other drive.

That's not true. Filesystems for hard disks are not stored as a file on the disk. They are installed in the RDB of the disk. If the filesystem required for the partition was stored inside the partition itself, then how would the system know how to access the partition in order to access the filesystem? It can't, which is why the filesystem has to be installed in the RDB. If it's missing from one of the drives, then it will have to be installed in the RDB using HDToolBox before that drive will work on its own.

scuzzb494 wrote:
Is it possible that the 2.5" is a none booting drive and can only be used as a slave, and that is how the guy set it up to get the 3.5" working.

Disks aren't booting or non-booting. This is configurable in HDToolBox. The drive itself doesn't decide whether or not it boots.

scuzzb494 wrote:
Just a longshot. I have had drives that have simply refused to boot from a cold start.

It's probably more likely that they didn't spin up in time for the system to attempt to boot from them.

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moto