Identical drives, but one doesn't boot.. D:

[rsilves]

Hi. I am having a weird problem here.

Last year I set up two Hackintosh computer for friends, and as I liked the ease to install OSX on those components, I used the same setup for 2 more computers, but in the newest ones I installed Snow Leopard.

Let's name them Computer 1 and 2 with 10.5 (.8 I think) and 3 and 4 with 10.6.3.

 

A month before, 4's owner called me saying that the Internet guy (yes, the man who went to her house to install the DSL connection) formatted the PC and installed Windows :S

As I kept a backup partition on 3 and 4, I simply took the drive from 3 and copied it to 4 (I used SuperDuper, and I remember that then I had to reinstall the bootloader) and it worked fine.

 

Setup:

P5QC with patched BIOS.

Q6600 or similar (not exactly sure).

4GB of RAM.

WD3200AAJS hard drives.

 

Problem:

Now I wanted to update computer 1 to SL, so I took 3's drive and tried to do the same, but didn't have success.

I copied the BIOS settings, and did the same procedure with SuperDuper and then reinstalling the bootloader, then copying the boot file.

First it hang on the "vmnet:" part, then I managed to uninstall VMware and I noticed that was not the problem, because then it hang on ACPI_SMC_PlatformPlugIn (which was right before vmnet), so I kept doing the next drive copies without removing VMware. It simply doesn't want to go further from that step.

 

- Drive 3 boots on computer 1.

- Drive 3's bootloader can boot drive 1 (I choose to boot from drive 3, then in the bootloader choose the partition from drive 1, it works).

So I suppose the problem something between the bootloader and drive 1.

 

But, as I said before, they are identical drives. One manufactured in May and the other in August. I tried erasing the drive and then making the partitions, and even making a copy without partitions, no success. (I partition it to then backup using SuperDuper).

 

Any ideas? I mean, this thing of copying worked a month ago! Which could be the problem?

Thanks,

Rodrigo Silvestri