No matter how the BIOS are set, the computer tries to boot to the Slave Hard Drive. When booting a message is displayed that states, "No O.S. Found, Press Any Key To Continue". [ the slave is a backup drive with no O.S.] When, as instructed, I press a key on the keyboard it boots to the Master Hard Drive. The Hard Drives are as follows: Master, is a 160gb Western Digital IDE and the Slave is a 20gb Maxtor IDE. The Master has Win98 S.E. on the First Partition and it has Win XP Pro. installed on the Second Partition [FAT 32] The Slave once had Win98 S.E. installed, but now it is used for storage and is displayed in the My Computer Section of the Master Hard Drive, O.S. Systems. [NOTE: A few days ago I partitioned and formated the Master Hard Drive using Norton Gdisk. It had 3 partitions. I thought Gdisk may have caused the boot problem, so I reformated and partitioned using the Western Digital Product "Data Lifeguard". However, the Boot results were the same.] The jumpers on the Master Hard Drive are set for Master and the Slave is set for Slave. The Maxtor instructions say the jumper removed or set to park is how to setup for Slave. I removed the jumper. I replaced the Hard Drive IDE Cable with a new IDE Cable. I have connected the IDE Cable correctly and also have switched the ends of the cables around from master to slave etc. but received the same bootup results. The Bios list the Western Digital as the Master and the Maxtor as the Slave. The Section of the BIOS that list the Hard Drives, show that both are set to AUTO. There is another section of the BIOS entitled "IDE Hard Drive Auto Detection". In this section the Master is set to AUTO and the Slave is set as USER [the correct PRI, CYL, SECTOR, SIZE LBA, ETC., is displayed under USER.] In this section, I tried to reset the Slave to AUTO, but it will not save the setting after resetting it to AUTO, it goes back to USER. Keep in Mind that in the first section of the BIOS, it displays AUTO for both of the Hard Drives. I also have tried setting both of the Hard Drives Jumpers to Auto Select. Also, I used the command Fisk /MBR but still received the same bootup results.

Go into the bios and look for the Boot Order, very likely it is set to boot to the 2nd hdd.(the 1st hdd could be hdd 0 vice hdd 1) If that is not the problem, did it ever work with the 2 hdds? Are you useing XP's boot loader or some other way to select OS to boot to.

It's usually best not to pair up 2 HDDs on the same cable/channel (same goes for optical drives). Try your storage HDD on the 2ndary channel...

Are you sure it's trying to boot from the slave? That is, if you disconnect the slave does the error message stop appearing? If it is actually booting from slave it may be as TopFarmer mentions or it may be the bios is having a bit of a problem with the 160 gig. You could try putting the smaller drive on the secondary cable and see if that makes a difference. Since both are able to boot then both have an active partition. If you can remove the active bit on the smaller drive then it won't boot. You can't do that with fdisk but perhaps the gdisk will be able to do it. The 'auto detect hard drive' is a separate way to ID the drive. If you use that feature then whatever it comes up with is what shows on the first cmos page as the drive type. Just ignore that and leave both as AUTO on the first page.

Thanks for the Replies: After my first post and after reading the replies to my Post, I rechecked the boot order in the BIOS. It is set to boot from Hard Drive one. I disconnected the Master Hard Drive, then booted up with a Win98 boot floppy in Floppy Drive. I then re-ran Fdisk without using the /s switch and then Formatted the Slave Hard Drive Hard. After reconnecting the Master Hard Drive and trying to boot the computer, the same "No OS Found, Press Any Key" message appeared. I pressed a keyboard Key and the PC booted to Win98 on the Master Hard Drive. A few moments ago I ran Diskwipe using Norton Gdisk. Gdisk commands listed Below: A:\GDISK 1 /MBR /WIPE /Y A:\GDISK 1 /CRE /PRI /SZ:100P /FOR /Q /ACT /V:BACKUP /Y The same boot Problem still occurred. If I disconnect the Slave HHD the Computer searches for the Master HHD then boots without the problem message. Since, it was suggested to try another Hard Drive as a Slave Hard Drive, I will remove the current Slave Hard Drive and install a Western Digital 40gb IDE Hard Drive that has Win XP installed on it and set it up as a Slave Hard Drive. I will Post the results. I can use Partition Magic and Boot Magic to force the Hard Drive Boot-up order, but I have heard that Partition Magic often causes Hard Drive Failure.

It sounds like on the initial boot, the first drive is not being detected. Check in the Bios for a 'fast boot' option and disable it.The first disk might be slow coming ready. Sorry, I do not check for private messages

You keep saying that it will boot to first HDD after the error so you do still have os on first HDD: " The Slave once had Win98 S.E. installed, but now it is used for storage and is displayed in the My Computer Section of the Master Hard Drive, O.S. Systems." If you installed 98 on second HDD then installed XP on first HDD with dual boot option, XP boot loader is looking on second HDD for 98. It just ...seems... like it booting from second drive. Best