Right, heres a quick history of the drive.
Maxtor 250gb diamondmax10 sata 16meg cache, bought new about ayear ago, first went into an xp system as the main drive for storage, boot, everything. Around 2 months ago, i bought a raptor, so i installed windows on the raptor and formatted the Maxtor.
Yesterday, i put the empty maxtor into a new system with a view to running Vista rc1. now heres the problem..
In either pc, with only the maxtor connected, if i set the bios to boot from cd, i either get a reboot, or the "ntldr is missing" error. its as if the maxtor is overriding the bios and not letting the cd/dvd drive boot. i have tried xp sp2 disc, vista rc1, the newer vista, 64 bit vista rc1, and also the newer one, all of these on different media, just to rule that out, different sata cables, different bioses.
so its got to be the maxtor, that, im pretty sure about, but i cant find anything wrong with it. it passes the windows diagnostics, it formats and partitions fine within windows xp, runs quick enough, isnt any more noisy than normal.
i have downloaded the maxtor diagnostics, but i cant run them, because it wont boot from cd, and ironically, my floppy drive died the other day.
does anyone have any ideas how i can fix this without a hammer?
thanks