Don't you hate it when you get so technically involved into something, then somebody just swoops in posts something so remedial.

Not that what I suggested will fix it, but I have had funky issues like what you are having with a Dual Drive 800k se, one of the drives would boot, one would not, however once booted both of the drives would R/W to disks.

I took the the one that was not booting cleaned it up, and kicked the tension on the adjustable perch(in the head assembly), just like CC_333 and I have talked about before, and bam they both would boot flawlessly. Its a shame though, ended up replacing those drives with superdrives and making the main board into a FDHD one.

Charles