long CMOS, boot issues

[rhian]

For starters, I am not real pc savvy I've aquired a computer that did work for previous owner. It wouldn't boot for me. Here is what i'm looking at upon opening the case....There is no floppy drive, there is a cd rom drive and 3 hdd. One hdd is not being used, therefore, not connected at all. I'm a newbie all I know is follow the IDE cables. The CDrom is Channel 0 master, jumper set on cable select, IBM Deskstar 40GB is Channel 0 slave, jumper set correctly as slave, Seagate Barracuda 80GB is Channel 1 master, jumper also set correctly.
Problem #1-cable came loose from CDrom, fixed that which got me past 'detecting ide ....' when booting, then after 'verifing dmi pool data..' a msg. reads 'changes have been made enter CMOS save and exit' so I enter set up. The secondary master isn't detected. Upon research, I determined the IDE cable was in upside down, boot agian, now the primary slave & sec. master are detected but the prime master has disappeared. I change jumper from cable select to master on the CDrom drive (not sure bout that?), boot agian, now primary master and slave are detected and the sec. master is gone agian. I check the cable agian, boot agian and AhHa all drives are there and XP loads. BUT the only user account has a password (won't be able to get pw fr. previous owner) My saga continues, I'm sorry, I got info @ password problem and how to bypass so I boot up agian. NOW it begins boot then half way through reboots itself BUT XP loads. The XP logon now shows a different user account w/no password. I guess I'm on another drive now? looks like a clean just loaded version of XP. I'm happy w/that so I reboot, enter set up to note current settings for future reference. Exit w/o changing anything, the boot finishes, the other XP loads & back to the password protected admin logon. From there I just keep going in trouble shooting circles of hdd detected sometimes, other times not, partial boot then reboot, or even a sytem boot failure enter boot disk, maybe XP will load maybe not...Help! First how come my drives disappear and reappear? The cables look fine. How come this XP will load at times and others the password protected XP loads? Why does the boot priority in CMOS change by itself? Should the CDrom jumper be cable select? i don't even know what that means. ahhh

[rjfvillarosa]

In this situation I suggest you start from scratch, remove all the hard drives from the machine, connect the IDE cable from the CD to IDE channel 1, now reinstall the hard drive you believe XP is installed on and connect it to IDE channel 0 via the IDE cable, set the jumpers on the CD and the hard drive to master untill we can establish what IDE cables you are using. Now go into CMOS settings and make the first boot device HDD 0 and the second boot device CD rom.
Start the machine up and see how you get on, come back and let me know.

[rhian]

thx for info, I took advice on connecting IDE cable Ch0 to hdd and Ch1 to CD both set as master, the drive works fine, the other hdd is shot I guess, i get a msg on boot saying "ntldr missing", i assume that is a directory? the 3rd hdd also works fine, so i've got 2 good 80gigs so i'm happy for now

[rjfvillarosa]

"ntldr" missing doesn't mean the drive is shot, all it means is that the soft ware used to boot up that drive is corrupt in some way and it can be repaired.
Do you have a copy of Windows that you can install on one of the drives?

[glc]

"NTLDR missing" simply means that the selected boot device is not bootable. This often happens when you leave a floppy disk in the floppy drive. In your case, it probably means that the hard drive you have installed right now does not have an operating system installed on it.