I have a PC for imaging hard drives, which recently started having problems.
All hard drives being imaged are Quantum Fireball 5.1Gb UDMA33 IDE, all with the same revision number, but a wide range of serial numbers.
If i image a brand new drive, all is well, but if I image a previously used drive, the machine doesn’t even finish the BIOS check with the imaged drive set to master, but boots fine with it set to a slave (even if I image a new drive then image it again). With it set to slave, I can boot normally, see the contents of the drive, and all seems well. I have tried using several PC’s to image from, using the master image which has been in a seperate location for the last year, formatted them, fdisked them, even run low-levelformats, all to no avail. I have performed full virus scans on all the drives, run various diagnostic tests on new, imaged and re-imaged drives, all seem to be fine, but as soon as a re-imaged drive is set to master, all I get is a flashing cursor in the top left of the display.
I have not tried any different make/model/size drives, as I have none available. I can’t believe all the drives are faulty (I have a random sample of about 15, with wildly different serial numbers). This system hasbeen working fine for over a year, and only last week failed.