machine: 1 gig ddr 3200 amd64 3000+ 80 gig SATA 160 gig SATA 40 gig IDE X800 PCI-E i get past the bios splashscreen to this "Disk Boot Failure, Insert System Disk and Press Enter". the 160 and 40 gig harddrives are have been completely wiped out, no xp is on it. i have windows xp professional and important data on the 80 gig hard drive. I think i have configured the bios properly to set the 80 hard drive to boot up first as the hard drive. I'm not sure if this would be an error, but i have no floppy disk drive. But in the bios, i have it set that there is no floppy drive. im going to try a windows repair on the 80 gig tomorow. But i have a good feeling im doing something stupid in the bios (even after i reseted it) im lost, if you need any more info on this i can reply back

How was your system configured before you wiped the two drives? You say XP resides on the 80gb SATA drive. Was that your C drive or was XP installed in a different lettered drive? How was the 80gb drive partitioned? I used to have a signature but it disappeared and I just couldn't be bothered writing another so please feel free to ingore this.

check master and slave setting of your hdd's Check your site's google Page Rank here

How is the boot priority set in bios? Shouldn't really matter if you have/had xp on all discs. Have you tried the fix mbr option? If I read rightly you have/had XP on all discs? Try the 40gb on it's own,set as master. If you get the same message then try the other discs 1 at a time. Remembering to change the boot priority accordingly. Sata discs into port1,master/slave is automatically set for sata drives. If you get the same message after trying all 3 it sounds like the dreaded XP formatt strikes again? At this point,if there is nothing on the 40gb or 160gb that is important you will need to reinstall windows and use a recovery program to retreive your data on the 80gb. There would be enough recovery room on the 160gb but maybe not on the 40gb? It's happend to me a few times and getdataback has recovered my data. Tt Lanfire MSI K8N Diamond AMD64 3000+'Venice' 1gb pc4400 OCZ Powerstream 520w 6600GT WDCaviar 160gb sata x2 ;~}

before all this clutter, i have windows xp home set up on all the hard drives. that prompted a windows selection screen whenever i booted up. I wanted things simple, and cleaner for this newly built rig. After a whole line of trouble with windows activation and buggy windows errors (i suspect from installing in those harddrives), I wiped out the 80 hard drive and reformatted it, then installed XP PRO. Next i transfered the the 35 gigs of data, collectively stored in the 160 and 40 gigs, and transferred it into the 80 gig. With all important stuff transferred, i booted up with the windows disc and wiped out the 160 and 40 gig hard drives. Finally i get this error message and thread. the 80 gig is not partitioned. i have tried the fixboot and chkdsk/p in repair. but im getting funky feelings, since the hard drive with windows (80 gigs) is set to "E:\". Fixboot prompted me to write a new bootsector in "C:\". have yet to try fixmbr

oh and i forgot to add, i changed the bootup selection in bios accordingly. Set the hard drive to be the first bootup, then configured the 80 gig to be the first priority hard drive.

There are a number of issues going on here that you need to understand regarding multi-booting and the way XP bootfiles are created. The currently installed XP on your 80gb harddrive was installed as an E drive. At the time it was installed you had a C drive and that is where the XP bootfiles were written. You have since formatted the C drive and thereby wiped out the bootfiles. Next you have tried to reconfigure your bootsequence in bios to make the 80gb drive your primary boot device. IE turn it into the C drive. Even if you write a new bootsector to that drive you will run into major issues with XP since all it's registry etc is configured as E and a cardinal rule of windows operating systems is that you cannot alter the drive letter of the System disk. My suggestion would be to restore the bootsequence in bios to the IDE drive as primary boot device and do a fresh instal of XP to that drive. Connect up the 160gb sata drive and use it as storage. transfer your data from the 80gb to the 160 then format the 80 to get rid of the extra version of XP that you do not need. You would then have your operating system on a C drive where it belongs plus two additional storage drives. I used to have a signature but it disappeared and I just couldn't be bothered writing another so please feel free to ingore this.