Problem booting Windows XP Pro

[MollyJolly]

I have a self-built PC with epox ep-8RDA3+ motherboard, 512meg RAM, CD-RW drive, floppy drive, and 160MB Western digital EIDE hard drive.

I have not worked very much with PCs recently. I managed to get the machine to start up (first time!) and then proceeded to install Windows XP Pro. I made the mistake ignorantly of trying to partition the hard drive from setup but I discovered that that could cause problems so I re-formated/partioned to one partition and reinstalled Windows. But the machine would not boot off of the hard drive. When the windows CD was in the CD drive it would boot off of that.

I changed the first boot sequence selection in BIOS from HDD-0 to HDD-1 when I realized that the hard drive was on the secondary master IDE chain and the CD-RW drive was on the primary chain. This resulted in progress - the desktop came up and I could access Windows from the hard drive.

But the machine will not boot from the hard drive alone. I need the Windows setup CD in the CD-RW drive to boot up. Without the CD, I get a "System boot failure' message.

I have tried using setup and going into ACR and using the command "fixmbr".
It says that I have an invalid or non-standard boot record and asks me if I want to still change and I could lose my data etc. . When I type "Y" it says the boot record has been rewritten. But the boot problem is not fixed. When I run fixmbr again, it gives the same message, and allows me to "fix" the master boot record again, with the same results. Data is not lost and Windows seems to operate normally.

I read somewhere that there might be a problem with the partition table. I bought PartitionMagic but have not seen any option to "rebuild" the partition table.

Neither re-partitioning with PartitionMagic, running a single partition from the Windows setup CD, nor running "diskpart" from ACR with a single partition corrects the non-booting problem.

Please help.

[Play_The_0dds]

now that you have the hard drive on the primary ide channel, the boot device should be set to hdd 0 , check the jumpers for correct setting think, if i remember right wd has a master of a single setting, if no other drives are on the ribbon, this should be it. can look at the top of the drive to see the options.

[Play_The_0dds]

thought about it more......if the above doesnt help, which i think the jumpers are probably it,....if you have the floppy disk that comes with the drive,if not can download it from the western digital site. do a low level format(packet write) full erase. use the floppy to set up the partitions. then install xp. wester digital,have one myself in this computer i am using ,tend to be very picky about the jumpers. here is the link to the settings.
http://support.wdc.com/techinfo/general/jumpers.asp

[MollyJolly]

Yeah, so that worked!

I checked the settings from the link above and set it from "Dual Master" to "Cable Select".

Then I did some research on what "Cable Select" means and I don't think I have such a special cable. It came with the motherboard, so I doubt it. I retested it withthe settings at "Single" and it also works, so I will leave it that way for now.


Thanks.