Problem booting from drive

[webmany]

I have a A1200 with 2 IDE HDs connected.  One internal and one external.  With both connected I can boot up and read data from both drives.  If I disconnect the external drive, it will not boot up.  I have verified that bootable is check on both drives, and I have tried C A A the 1200 after it is running incase it was a delay problem.

[webmany]

Both drives are connected to the HD connector on the motherboard.  The internal drive is a 2.5" laptop drive with a long cable to connects to a 3.5" HD outside the case.  

Both drives have a full install of OS 3.1, so it did boot at one time.

The boot menu does show both drives and all partitions are set bootable.

I don't remember the ability of changing a laptop drive from master and slave, isn't it cable select?

This machine was recently purchased and I am seeing what I can do with it.

[webmany]

It looks like the external was the original drive and the internal was the new drive.  What I think someone did was copy everything from the old to the new drive.  Looking into startup-items they both the same (starting items from DH0), so if I disconnect the internal drive, items do not start.

So I guess I need to find out if some files either did not copy or are damaged on the new drive.

[webmany]

Does the boot priority matter if it is the only bootable drive, like when the external drive is removed?

[webmany]

Found it.  If the external drive is removed, then the internal drive does not show up in the boot menu.  Find this a little weird as I have a second A1200 setup with a internal HD and it works fine.  Even tried a different cable.

Guess I will track down a different laptop HD and try it.

Thanks for all the help.