Upgraded Hard Drive in Big Al - problems

[Photios Dumont]

I finally upgraded my hard drive in my Big Al 17". My drive arrived today
from Googlegear. They had the best price for an 80g Hitachi Travelstar.
Opening up the computer was not too difficult. I popped in the drive, and
then put everything back together. I encountered a few problems which I
think others will find very interesting:

1) First of all, you cannot boot off of the 80 gb drive if it has only one
80 (really 75) gb partition. I decided to break it in half at 37.5 and 37.5.
This was a little dissappointing, since I had already taken the time to
install OS X from the back up DVD, and it would not boot. I decided to
partition, as I noted above, and this time it worked... Well sort of, and
that's what brings me to problem #2...

2) There must be something in the firmware of the 60gb Toshiba that Apple
programmed, because - The error message that I got when I tried to boot off
of the 75g partition, comes up again everytime I restart the computer or log
out. What's weird is that if I try to log out, the OS will acknowledge the
command, and then the screen will dim and I will get this message that I
need to restart the computer by holding the power button on, etc. At the
bottom of this message is some hex code which seems to be the same code
which I saw in a message when I tried to boot my computer after loading the
OS on one whole partition.

The long and the short of all this is that its just seems too inconvenient
for me to leave the 80g drive in, because of the erros on logging out and/or
restarting. Plus, I'm not sure what else might be misbehaving because of the
lack of firmware in the 80g drive.  I'm just going to have to use it
externally. By the way, too, once I put the original 60gb Toshiba back into
Big Al, everything returned to normal.

Anyway, this is just some observations, and if anyone has some more
information, I'd be very interested, as may others.

Thanks!

Photios