I just cloned this drive from my old Western Digital WD1600JS with Maxblast 5, and no matter what I do, the drive will not boot afterward. It appears to clone just fine. I have tried switching the SATA ports, making the drive port #1 after cloning(vs selecting it from the BIOS boot menu (F8)), with no difference. It basically acts like theres no OS installed, or no MBR. If I boot on the Western Digital and navigate to this drive all the files are there, and are accessible. HdTach shows almost 70MB/sec transfer rate so the drive appears to be working fine.

I will run SeaTools as a last resort on the drive and see if there are any bad sectors. I also found an old copy of norton ghost. Will try that before I give up.

This is the Maxtor branded Seagate drive, with a model number of STM3500630AS. The one on sale at CompUSA right now for $119 if anyone is wondering. The drive looks identical to the seagate, and the biggest chip on the underside has Seagate stamped on it.

Any ideas?

My Motherboard is an ASUS A8N5X Nforce4.

Hi,

have you tried to disconnect your old drive?
If I remember correctly, Windows writes an unique ID onto the disc. This might prevent your system from booting off this HDD.

I would try a repair installation from your Windows CD with the other disc disconnected. This should fix the problem, but you'd have to reinstall all Windows updates after being done.

Michael

Does Maxblast also clone the MBR?
I know Acronis does, but you have to restore the MBR after restoring the partition when you restore to a new drive.

Also be aware that adding a drive can often cause the motherboard to re-set the boot priority of the hard drives. Check to be sure your board is not trying to boot from the wrong drive.

I had the same problem. Booted with Acronis disk and clicked the box that says restore MBR and worked fine.

IMO I would use True Image reintall the disk as the master with no second HDD and reboot.

I ended up figuring it out. Although I've read of others simply quick-formatting and cloning. I had to do a full format, then use Acronis TrueImage, problem solved. Windows is now very slow booting (taskbar icons loading, etc...)from this drive though. Turns out Fragmentation on my old drive was 30% disk, and 70% file, so I am defragging the Western Digital and cloning again. Oddly the WD ran windows blisteringly fast even as fragmented as it was, but the Seagate is a turd.

This drive has perpendicular recording as well, which should make it more responsive.

Are Seagates just this much slower than an old 160GB WD?

BTW, Maxblast 5, and Seagate disk tools appear to use a co-branded version of Acronis. The menu's and everything look the same but with Maxtor/Seagate logo's instead of Acronis. In the lower corner the program says it is Powered by Acronis.