new PC won't boot from CD

[choirmaster]

I have successfully assembled and tested my new PC but it won't boot up from the CD drive. I have selected the CD drive as the first boot drive but when I restart with the Maxtor bootable disc I get a blanc screen. I have also noticed that in the BIOS it looks as though the drives are not detected yet when I choose the boot drive it lists all the drives.
The specs on my system are as follows:

ASUS p5wd2 motherboard
Maxtor 6L100PO HDD
Maxtor 6L160PO HDD
Sony CDRW
Corsair 1Gb
Radeon VGA

Someone help please.

[k9bliss]

I assume that you have a OS on the of the HD's?

[choirmaster]

The CD is the formatting CD for the HDD. I have a seperate CD for Win XP.

[k9bliss]

You were able to load XP on the HD?

[chuck4456]

Format the hard drive with the XP CD. It's all in there.

[k9bliss]

Just as chuck said, you need to format the hd if you haven't already and then load XP on the hd.This all done from your XP cd. The cd for hd don't need it.

PS< Just a little note on setting your first boot drive, once you have pick the one you want(cd drive) to be the first boot drive do you click on exit and save choice before leaving Bios setup.

[glc]

You do not need to use the Maxtor CD. Just boot with the XP CD, Setup will do your partitioning and formatting for you.

Make sure you are using 80 wire IDE cables on all IDE devices, and they are all jumpered to CS (cable select).

[choirmaster]

I am using the ribon cables that came with the motherboard but I have my HDDs set on master and slave configuration. The 100GB is master and 160Gb is slave. I want the 100 Gb HDD to be the boot drive. I will be running proprietary software that requires a nonboot drive to reside on. Will the CS setting acomplish this? Will the XP disc be able to format the 160Gb HDD effectively?

[glc]

80 wire cables are designed to be used with CS jumpering. The end drive will be master and the middle drive will be slave. Do the same with the optical if you are also using an 80 wire on that channel. Master/slave jumpering is only used with old 40 wire cables.

Leave the 160 disconnected till Windows is installed and updated to SP2 - then reconnect it and partition/format it from within Windows.

Just curious - why didn't you buy SATA hard drives?

[choirmaster]

Thanks for the tips. This will probably get me going. I had originaly bought the 100Gb for my Dell Pentium 3 Win2k machine thinking I could run my recording software on it but it only runs on P4 with XP. I wasn't sure if I could run different types of HDDs off the same mobo. I know better now but I already have them so I may as wel use them.
Just another stupid question. How does one tell the difference between 40 wire and 80 wire cable?

[flanzig1]

80 wire IDE cables have a blue/gray/black connectors. 40 wire generally are all one color.

[glc]

The ribs in the cable are a lot finer on an 80. 40's generally have black connectors at both ends, 80's generally have one black end and one end of a different color - usually blue.

[choirmaster]

Thanks for the definision. I have restarted and have the CDRW as booting drive. Now I am getting a stop error from the Windows XP disc. At this point I only had the 100Gb HDD hooked up to the mobo and power. To see if it was a bad HDD I switch to the 160Gb HDD and got the same error. The error code is as follows:
*** STOP: OX0000007B (OXF7C7A524, OXC0000034, 0X00000000, 0X00000000)
What is this all about?

[glc]

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/324103