PC will not boot directly from HDD

[thadraperyfallz]

So....anyone have a hammer handy? I'm piecing together a computer from parts that have been given to me, and everything was moving along fine until this morning. I installed the drives, pci cards, etc. I went to the BIOS, told it boot from CD-ROM as I was installing XP. The install of XP went great, but the problem lies in the way the system boots now. If I go into the BIOS and tell it to boot from the HDD, it wont. It recognizes the HDD in the BIOS, but won't boot directly from it. Heres the wierd part...if I turn the boot priority back to the CD-ROM and let it prompt me to "Press any button to boot from CD-ROM", but don't press any buttons, XP will load up fine. I've tried everything that comes to mind. New IDE ribbon, jumpers are in CS position, etc.... Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[ManyVoicesOfMe]

It's fine just to leave the boot order to boot from the cd-rom first. If you want the "press any key to boot from cd" thing to go away, don't have a cd in the drive when starting up your computer. Usually when it gives you that "press any key to boot from cd" option, it's most likely that you have a bootable cd-rom in the drive at the time. Like the Windows XP install cd maybe.......

But if you want it to boot from the hardrive first, make sure the first boot device is "IDE-0" instead of "IDE-1". Then again, different computers have different BIOS menus, so they vary...

 

[thadraperyfallz]

It's fine just to leave the boot order to boot from the cd-rom first. If you want the "press any key to boot from cd" thing to go away, don't have a cd in the drive when starting up your computer. Usually when it gives you that "press any key to boot from cd" option, it's most likely that you have a bootable cd-rom in the drive at the time. Like the Windows XP install cd maybe.......

But if you want it to boot from the hardrive first, make sure the first boot device is "IDE-0" instead of "IDE-1". Then again, different computers have different BIOS menus, so they vary...

If the CD isn't in the CD ROM, then it still won't boot...it's almost like that whole "press any key to boot from cd" prompt is like a buffer that allows the HDD to realize what's goin on. I didn't understand the whole thing about "IDE=0" and "IDE=1" either....

Thanks

 

[thadraperyfallz]

I ran msconfig & looked @ the boot.ini entry, and it looks different than my other computer (the one that works). Is there any way to edit the syntax for the operating system under the boot.ini tab?