PCTech Forums

It sounds like it might be when the IDE drive is connected it becomes the first boot device.
Go into your BIOS and check your boot priority settings,
make sure that the raid device is before your IDE drive.

You could also try jumping the IDE drive to slave and put it on the lower ribbon cable connection.

Thanks man... you nailed it.

I don’t think the problem is the hard drive.
Does the BIOS see the hard drive and the dvd drive during bootup?

Try download a windows 98 boot disk from www.bootdisk.com.
Boot from the floppy with cd rom support and the windows xp cd in, at the command prompt type:
D: and press enter

You will either access the windows cd or get an error, tell me which one.

I used the Win 98 OEM bootdisk.
Upon booting, Bios recognized and listed DVD-Rom and hard drive. I selected boot with CD support. I checked all possible drive possibilities. A:\, B:\ (seemingly same as A:), and C:\. When I checked D:\ I got invalid drive specification. I did a listing of C:\ and the only three files were:
Command.com
Extract.exe
Readme.txt

When you boot from the win98 floppy just before it finishes with the command prompt.
It should tell you what drive letter it assigned to the DVD drive.
Don’t confuse this with the ram driver it made to boot from.

If you cannot read from that drive it’s either the CD is bad or the DVD drive is bad.

Is this a Microsoft windows xp cd or a oem restore cd?

It's a Windows Xp CD, did I not use the right boot disk?

That's the right floppy

Maybe you have cable select only cables
Try setting the HDD and the other DVD to CS (cable select) and then connect them to the middle connector on each ribbon.

Applied the changes you suggested, still nothing. It seemed to recognize the cd drive, but when I tried to access it, "Invalid drive specification...".

I just came across my other Windows XP disk and a Win 98 disk. When I booted with the other XP CD I was allowed to start the setup. I'll give installation a try and let you know the results.