Thanks for visiting my post.
Their's afew things that happens when it doesn't detect the rom, when i connect all the power plugs into the HDD, Both Roms and the floppy drive, the computer just enters the bio's and just freezes, but when i remove the power plugs too both the roms and restarted it, it goes normally into windows and when i attach it again the hdd doesn't detect and the rom works, i just replaced the power supply (was "350w" NOW "400w") and does the same thing. Thanks
Also: before i installed the SP2 xp update everything worked fine.
"Running Windows Xp SP2 installed"

have you checked your jumper settings.

you should aim for 1 master and 1 slave drive on each ide channel

ie ide channel 0 Hard drive (master) second hard drive or cd rom (slave)
Ide channel 1 cd-rom (master) cd-rom (slave)

get the picture as it sounds like a misplaced jumper

Hello,

Janine may be onto something here -- the BIOS is not detecting the IDE settings correctly, thus it is probably waiting to TIMEOUT, not a hang, but waiting for the devices to respond to the query.

Yes, please do get the IDE jumpers in order. 1 master, and one slave. The master is usually connected in the "middle" of the cable, and the slave on the furthest connector.

Christian

thanks for agreeing christian.

one thing to watch out for torrent.. some drives especially hard drives have a dual jumper setting (that's it two jumpers instead of one). if one of these has slipped this could also be causing the problem