Mike Cloaked wrote:
In fact with no alteration in the BIOS settings at all - once the new HD was in place I interrupted the boot with F12 and selected the optical drive to start PartedMagic from the liveDVD - exactly this process worked once the new drive was in place where it failed to do so with the dead HD in place - that is something I never experienced before.
It may have been that the drive was detected, but was not responding to the request for drive information. The system will hang for a long time waiting for the drive to spin up and respond. You can run into the same problem when the BIOS is set to a specific drive size/type, and you remove that drive. I have also seen it happen when you put in too large of a drive for the controller.
Mikkel