Erratic Boot record??

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Hi,

I'm not sure how to explain this problem so please bear with me.

Yesterday, one my older hard drives (Primary Slave) began emitting multiple beeps when booting and caused my computer to fail booting.

So to fix this I removed the hard drive and rebooted my computer.
Then my computer would spend a lot of time searching for my Primary Master hard drive and eventually would either boot, hang or ask me for a boot diskette.

Thinking my Master Boot Record had gotten damaged I decided to repair WindowsXP Pro and see if things would get better ...no luck

Next i decied to see if the BIOS was up to date which it wasn't so i updated the BIOS ...still no luck

Then I decided to perform a clean format and re-install WindowsXP Pro and update my Chipset drivers since they needed to be updated ...and yes, you guessed it ....NO LUCK :mad:

Right now the problem I’m having is that if I close the computer for more than approximately 15-30 minutes my boot record seems to disappear (if that's even possible)

Here’s what a typical post shutdown boot looks like:
When I start the computer it takes forever to go through the first stages of auto-detecting my Primary Master Hard Drive then it will begin searching for the Boot Record on the CD-ROM then the Floppy and then the Hard Drive with no success and ultimately ask me to insert a Boot Diskette in drive A.

My response is to reset the computer which will sometimes fix the problem but most of the time I need to go into the BIOS and reset my hard drive detection to AUTO instead of USER in “IDE HDD AUTO DETECTION”

By doing so I can restart the computer without a glitch (Other than the extremely long auto-detection of Master Drive part) but as soon as I shut it down completely for more than 15-30 minutes the problems reappear.
The last thing I did was have my CMOS battery checked and It’s OK

Anyways I’m totally lost as to what could cause this intermittent problem

Help is needed big time

Thanks for your time,
Mario

Computer is P4 1.5
Motherboard: MSI 845 PRO with A6529MS v1.3 BIOS update
512 Mb RAM
 
set the jumper on the primary master to single drive operation ( look at the jumpers between the power molex and the ide ribbon ) and look on top of the drive on how to set the jumper for single operation ...
 
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