Last night every programme I tried to use stopped responding, so i rebooted and i was offered to start in safe mode which i stupidly declined, but it wouldnt start normally then.

now today have the same problem. When I put my XP disc in, it says its repairing and copies files, then says its gonna reboot.

it does reboot but I get the same page asking me for my boot up disc.

The Primary IDE master and slave are both of my dvd roms.

My Hdd is listed as fourth..master, but when I try to boot from it I get a message saying the drive is not ATAPI compatable.

Has anyone got a clue whats wrong please?

hi, start from the basic make your HDD as primary IDE master and install only one dvd-rom, don't connect other drives, install these two drives first as HDD master DVD slave..then check if it will work properly..then try to install the other drives one at a time.. hope this helps...

Thank you for your reply. How do i make the HDD the master, because it doesnt see it at all.

Also its a SATA and doesnt have master/slave

We have tried the HDD in a caddy and connected to the laptop, and it started uploading.

We also tried a new HDD cable,

maybe my HDD drivers are corrupted, what do you think?

We did disconnect the 2 dvd drives yesterday, cant remember what happened though, have tried that many things. However will try again, and report back.

many thanx for trying to help.

All SATA drives are master by default (only one drive per channel).

From your description, drive is recognized by BIOS and by XP CD.

Enter Recovery Console after booting from XP CD and try these commands:

fixmbr
fixboot

Instructions for Recovery Console:
http://www.windowsnetworking.com/articles_tutorials/wxprcons.html

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