This is weird. I had an error last night telling me that one of the dll's was damaged, and to put the windows xp cd in to repair the prob. So I did, and it seemed to fix it. I ran the system file checker to check if there were any other probs, but none reported. When I started my pc up this morning, it has started booting of my second SATA drive, which was previously my system disk.

Both disks show up in disk management, and it knows that the current system disk is on sata channel 2, and the actual system disk is on 1.

I don't know why this has happened, and i dont know how to change it back.

There is no option in my bios (a7n8x deluxe) to choose which sata drive to boot off.

I have thought about just swapping the cables over, but i'd rather work out what is actually wrong.

So, my guess is the change happened when you repaired the XP install. Is XP installed on the second hard drive?

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Morpheus: There is a difference between knowing the path and walking the path. "The Matrix"

Yes. The drive the pc is now booting of, was previously my system disk. When I upgraded, I made no changes to the drive. I installed a new drive with a fresh copy of xp. Which has worked fine all this time.

So yes, both drives are bootable. But why has the pc suddeny started booting from the old drive.

Sorted it out, it was all down to Windows XP cd being left in the drive. Sounds weird, but I tested it out a few times and it is. When the cd is in the drive, and the bios is set to boot from cd before hdd, it does that thing where you have to press any key if you want to load windows setup. This must cause some sort of delay, or confusion, and tell the pata to boot instead. If the cd is out, or disable boot from cd, the pc will boot from sata.

This doesn't happen with any other cd I know.