Hello :)
Thank you for the replies :) However my actual question remains unanswered.....
I DID have each device set in the BIOS as first boot device (on my machine i have to hit "delete" to get into there, right after pressing the power button because the machine boots/post's a hell fast) and i am presented with three "boot devices", as there are "Harddisk" (which i can select the first or the second HDD, if i have the second one mounted since that one is in a removable frame), "Optical Device" from which i can select either of the CD drives (here in my case either the DVD, which is master on IDE2 or the CD/R which is slave on IDE2) and the third choice are the floppies, again i can chose between two because i have indeed two 3,5" floppy drives installed.
What did puzzle me is the fact that either optical drive does start to spin the disk, as if it would be reading - the screen then says "booting from ATAPI CD-ROM" with either drive - yet nothing else happens, it will go to a black screen with just a blinking cursor and the booting process sort of stops there. After a while the CD will stop spinning and the computer will not react to any input from either keyboard or mouse. When i press the "eject" button on the respective CD drive, it will eject the CD, if i close it again it will briefly spin it up as if readinmg it but again, the booting process will not continue.
In the meantime i did some research and found that i need to "boot" from a floppy disk which includes a specific driver for either drive - CD/R or DVD - in order to "load" data from those. It looks like i am screwed, having TWO non-ATAPI compatible devices in my machine. I did try with the floppy disk that was included in the package of the DVD drive, and indeed it works - it boots into DOS and gives me a command prompt from which i can chose the DVD drive (in that case "D:" because neither the partitions of the HDD nor the second HDD nor the CD/R drive are detected!) and THEN it will allow me to run "setup" from the Windows XP CD, which in turn will well detect all the partitions and physical drives. A bit confusing, but it does work.
I remember that the CD/R drive, when i bought it three years back, came with such floppy disk as well, i guess that one served the same purpose. I don't have it anymore, because i never used it - either drive, once physically mounted in my machine, was immediately and correctly identified and installed by XP and was working from the very first start without any extra drivers.
Maybe what's causing me a bit hickhack is the fact that both of the HDD's are using NTFS exclusively? It would at least explain why the startup disk from the DVD drive will not detect any of the partitions. I have four identical partitions on either HDD since the second one serves as a 1:1 backup of the first, which i update once a month or so, enabling me in the case of a total HDD loss to still have fairly recent data content available. I once fried a HDD and know what it means to lose everything.
Still my original question remains - is there a way to "trick" the PC into booting from a DVD or CD/R directly, without needing a driver floppy first? I am thinking of machines without floppy drive, as they are more and more common nowadays.
Kind regards.....
Thanh
