*twitch* Help?

Ok, here is the situation. Last night, I formatted my hard drives, and re-installed windows xp pro. Went in, everything worked fine within the operating system. I formatted my other drives, and finished making all the partitions. Restart my computer, and I am greeted by a nice message.

'PRESS A KEY TO REBOOT'

So I figure, maybe something updated within the background *because I had installed systemworks before I rebooted*, and I pressed enter to reboot. Computer starts again, and it shows the message again. I am not even able to get to the windows boot screen. So, I put in my windows cd, and started my computer. It goes into windows fine. Take the cd out, and I get the message again. So, I went into the windows recovery console, and repaired the boot loader, and my MBR. Still does it, unless I have the win cd in. Any recommendations?

Shots in the dark...

Do you have your hard drive set to boot in your BIOS? In your BIOS, you can set your floppy disk, CD drive, and then hard drive to boot up if there is any bootable information off of them. However, it is also likely that you replaced boot hard drive with boot cd, to make it work...

Just an idea! I don't know how viable it is.

Tell me if it works though...

Nah, its not my boot order. I have not done any changes within my BIOS. But, for the sake of showing you, my boot order is:

Floppy
CD-Rom
Hard-Drive
Add-On Cards

hehe, I do know my way around a computer, and have already considered that already. Any other ideas? *I am trying out one now, where I have my ntldr, NTDETECT.COM, and my boot.ini on a floppy disk, because M$ had a recommendation on this.

Ok, the floppy disk idea worked. That makes me have 2 ideas.

1. My computer is doing like it did once before, and loads another hard drive as my primary hard drive. When a o/s cd is in, my primary hdds switch.

2. It might by some chance be related to what M$ said, and be a problem w/ a incompatibility with my processor and the OS, but that dosent make alot of sense, because I havent really ever had a problem like this before, and its a Intel processor.

Any way I can get around having to do the floppy fix?

Set the boot order as floppy H/D and then Cd....or make the first boot device the H/D

It *might* have to do with your Master/Slave switches on your HD's as well. If you have two HD's and the switches are incorrect your mobo is trying to boot from the wrong HD.

Wedo

lol. Not it, Wedo, or Diehrd. Thanks for the help everybody, but I figured it out. For some reason, my computer was trying to initialize my slave IDE chain as the main, instead of the primary. Not entirelly sure why, but I just flashed my BIOS w/ a new version *since I was updating everything* and it stopped. Oh well. I will figure out why it was doing that in time.

Sounds like an order problem in the CMOS, not the drive, but the entire IDE initialization.