Thanks jam for bein helpful u da man dude.

Ok before christmas my system was like this.
a single 40gb hard drive with a cd burner. the hard drive was on master and so was the cd burner.

Ok then for christmas I got a 120gb hard drive and a dvd burner. First I put in the hard drive and hooked it up with the grey cable that ran out of the 40gb hard drive. The default was on Cable default.

Then I put in the dvd burner with the grey cable coming out of the cd burner. I formatted the hard drive and put Xp on it. I rebooted and it was running fast and awsome. YEY no more slowness. Then I first put the motherboard drivers on it, then norton systemworks, then my wireless internet, then the necessary windows updates.

After a few hours getting my new stuff on there and rebooting it would ask which version of windows I wanted to start up. Windows XP or Windows XP (new or old hdd). So I decided I wanted to delete everything off the old drive as I transferred everything I needed to the desktop already. I went into my computer and tried to format it.

It said that something was reading it and I couldnt format it then. So I went in manually and tried deleting everything. It didnt work so I restarted, changed bios to boot cd, and then deleted the partion on it. I then formated it and it said like Raw data or something like that.

It restarted, I changed the bios back the way it was and then an error, boot disk failure, please insert a system disk and press enter. I tried everything to get it working and right now my old hard drive is unplugged, the new one is set to master, the bios reads it, but I cant get to windows and I cant boot from the cd. It just hangs when I try. Thanks

on 120 gig set as master, on dvdburner set as master & cdburner as slave. see if bios sees this configuration, also change boot sequence for now with floppy, cdrom than hd in that order. reboot system with xp in dvd drive. post results

david

oh wow ddp59 u saved my life! god I wanna send u money now. ok that got me into the setup. I tried all configurations except that one. Now what do I do? Do I have to reformat it again? THANKS A BUNCH!

Ok in the settings it shows my partioned drive. the 120gb one. But I dont have the other one hooked up. Can I hook up the 40gb one as a slave and then just install windows Xp on my 120gb one and use the 40 as backup? Thanks!

You may need to set the new drive to "Active" to boot from it.
Check the XP CD for a program named FDISK and run it (I hope it's there!). Choose the new drive and then there is a point that allows you to activate it.

Check if you're now able to boot from it.
If not the problem maybe that your main boot sequence was on the old drive and you probably deleted it with the old one. Then you may need to reinstall XP to get it working again.

if old hd doesn't have xp on than hookup old hd & install xp on new hd

david

Since the DVD burner can also burn CDs, the CD burner really isn't needed.

This is how I would configure the 4 devices:

primary master = 120gb HDD
primary slave = CD burner
2ndary master = DVD burner
2ndary slave = 40gb HDD

Always use the master & slave jumper settings - don't use cable select. Use 80-wire IDE cables for both channels.

Asus A7N8X-X
1800+ @8x210mhz
512mb PC3200
Ti4200/8X 128mb
WDC 60GB