Every time I try to select using my hard drive on its own as the master it will boot up and then go to a blank screen with a blinking cursor and do nothing else. However, when I sue it as a slave with another hard drive it will load up the O/s it has on it (windows xp) where as the other HDD has windows 98se installed on it, so it gives a choice when the computer is loading up. I just find it strange that it wont run on its own , being a master drive. I have tried messing around with the jumper settings but have had very little luck. The other thing is, when I have the two HDD connected, and I plug the CD drive into the second IDE slot on the motherboard, kit doesn’t load up either. SO, im thinking its got something to do with the BIOS settings. MY set up is Maxtor 160GB as slave and 40GB Western Digital as master. They are connected using one cable into IDE 0 and the CD drive is connected into IDE 1, but when the CD drive is plugged in it doesn’t work. So does anyone know how I can sole this problem, I basicly need to just use the one HDD and the One CD drive. (the HDD being the 160GB one) Any help would be fantastic. +Thanks MY PC PC chips M/board 2400 + AMD XP 512 MB PC2100 Geforce 256 MB FX5200

Just a first punch at the problem, but I know that western digital drives have a jumper for master and another jumper for master with slave present. You're concerned with the latter jumper. Look into it. Also, your BIOS should have a setting for both boot order AND hard drive identity. Look in the hard drive identity and make sure the one you want to boot from is listed first, this will corespond to the hard drive in the boot order. If it's anything like my BIOS, the boot order only lists one hard drive as the boot drive and I can change this drive via the settings for hard drive identity. ASUS P5GD1 P-4 3.4 SOCKET 775 1G Corsaire PC400 ABIT RX600SE 256MB PCI-E

You cannot 'move' hard drives with an OS around to a different letter and have them work. If an OS is installed on a D: drive, it will only work as a D: drive. It will NOT work as a C: drive, which it seems you are trying to do.