i just installed second hard drive in pc. because of the ribbon length i had to make old hd the slave and new hd master.i made the new hd into 4 partitions.the old hard drive had two partions c and d and is dual booting win98 and win2000. now when i tried to boot it said no os loaded. is this because the new hard drive is master and changed the boot sequence?so i went in to bios and changed the boot sequence from cdrom,c to d,sci and then the pc booted to windows. how can i fix it so that i can change the boot sequence to the way it was before.i want cdrom first.thanks

I think i know what is wrong but dont know how to fix it. the new hd is master(0) which the sytems boots first. the slave which i want to boot first is (1) .to fix this do i have to change boot.ini files or is there another easier way. again because of cable length new hd must be master.

How does cable length matter? Can't you just swap the mounting positions of the hard drives?

Your drive letters have been reassign by the OS primary master is now drives C and E second drive (does not matter if master or slave) drives D F G H. if your want to boot from your old D now E. you can (1) use a boot manager or (2) wipe out your second drive and fdisk it with only an extended partition take you pick

The cable length forced your choice because you are using cable select? Won't the drives boot if you jumper one master and the other slave? Obviously, if they will boot so jumpered, you can just change jumper positions to make your new drive master. (I have a Western Digital drive on a controller card that will only run right jumpered CS, but most drives can be jumpered master and slave)

i did not want to swap the hd's and the two hd's are are situated a distance apart so that the new hd which is a couple of bays above the old hd wont reach the ribbon if the new hd is slave.

Swapping the hard drives will not solve the problem. The easiest method is to get your boot manager to boot for C and E instead of the present C and D. Unless you move a partition the present configuration will only boot the existing C. If you swap drives it will try to boot from the first partition of the new Drive. (Unless you can switch order in BIOS)