Built a new computer with an N2PA Ultra MB, Athlon XP 1800+ CPU, 256 MB DDR RAM, eGeForce FX video card. Installed Win2k smoothly, however, system will not boot from hdd after installing the OS. System recognizes hdd during boot as the primary master. Changed BIOS to boot from floppy, hdd-0, hdd-1, other. Made other changes just to test it. Nothing seems to work. Any ideas?

What do you mean "nothing works"? Just the booting of the hd? Or the entire system? If you can boot up on a boot diskette then do so. Do a dir of c:. Bring up fdisk and look at the drive. So you see a bootable partition? Do you see files? If the drive is dead replace it. If its OK then redo your install or fdisk and format it to make sure it will boot first then install w2k.

The last time this happened to me, the jumper setting were wrong on the primary master drive. It would fdisk, format, install an OS, and refuse to boot. I got an invlid system disk message. Once booted from a floppy, all data was accessable. Bear in mind, this was an old seagate drive with 3 jumper options to configure it as master. That said, #1 response is good advice. Skip

a little clarification on wanderer post " So you see a bootable partition" you will see (ACTIVE) "bootable partition" when you run fdisk under I think dos type.

I am getting the same problem, have been tinkering with my computer for some time now as I couldn't get floppy drive to work, now my hard drive doesn't either - got a bad feeling about it, I can see the hard drive, but I am getting the exact same messages.

I am having the same problem too, bios sees everthing correctly but the system wont boot... even with bootable media in both A: & cdrom drive ... can't figure it out ... Please Help !!!!

Blaine to boot to a: or cd might have to go into bios and change the boot order. I suguest for both Blaine and john smith to make new threads of your own to get answers to problems.