Hard drive and DVD drive issues

[Tetra-Stryf]

This is my first post on this forum, and hopefully it is in the correct area.

I did a clean install of Windows XP Pro on a secondary computer. After doing this I started having issues booting properly. When attempting to boot with both my HD and DVD drives plugged in. They work fine separately.

I have them connected with separate IDE cables. They are both in the first IDE slot on the cable. The HD's jumpers are set to Master and the DVD is set to cable select.

Another interesting thing I just noticed is that when I go to the boot sequence in my BIOS it states in this order:
1. Hard-Disk Drive C:
2. Floppy device (not installed)
3. CD-ROM device (not installed)

I have already tried changing the jumper settings to everything I can think of but this hasn't helped. I have tried clearing the CMOS, and rebooting the BIOS with the alt-e-f-b keyboard command(its a dell motherboard).

I am now completely stumped and could use all the help that I can get.

EDIT: I am receiving an error message that states, "diskette drive 0 seek failure." It then prompts to press F1 to continue or F2 to enter setup. If I press F1 it does boot to Windows but I can't go anywhere because the Windows installation can not continue without the Windows XP Pro disk. :EDIT

EDIT2: Feel free to offer up any advice included but not limited to little things that I may have missed. I really wouldn't be surprised if I missed something extremely stupid. I don't consider myself an expert or specialist in any way. :EDIT2

 

[tipstir]

You have a DELL MOBO...
Replace the Battery on the MOBO
Unplug all devices
Clear the CMOS
Go into the BIOS and disable the FDD
Plug-in HDD as your Master Primary and CD-ROM as your Secondary Master.
Save and Reboot the system
Press F12 to force the boot to HDD if you already have the OS installed correctly.

If not then place your CD with XP Pro and then press F12 and boot the CD to start first.

If you can't get this far, then go and buy and new MOBO combo with the CPU of your choice. Again this move will depend on you if you want to go that way...

 

[Liquidlen]

It does not appear that BIOS is recognizing the ROM drive.I would not use Cable select setting It only works if all connections on the IDE cable are populated and the the cable is the 80 pin type. Set the jumper as Master.You must get the BIOS to recognize the drives.You might need to try new cables, also

 

[mailpup]

Liquidlen means 40 pins, 80 wires.

 

[Tmagic650]

Yes that's true Mailpup,
another way of saying this is " 80 conductor cable"

 

[Liquidlen]

Thanx guys ! I needed some more coffee that day.

 

[Tetra-Stryf]

Figured it out

I figured out what the problem is and its probably the weirdest coincidence that I have ever had. I decided to get off of my **** and pull out my good old trusty voltage meter. I found that the bus line that my dvd drive was plugged into is dead. So I set both on the same IDE cable and the dvd drive was still not working. Upon further examination of the cable I found that it had been ever so slightly severed just before the second connector. I swapped the IDE cable and everything is working fine now.

Just in case anyone was wondering, that Dell Mobo is on my test computer that I use to play around on.