XP has to have CD in drive to startup

[autotran]

My XP Home computer will not startup unless there is a XP install disc in one of my CD/DVD drives. I have five CD and DVD drives, two IDE DVD's and three SCSI CD or DVD drives. I can put the XP disc in anyone of these drives and the computer starts fine from the C drive. It is a Serial ATA150, 250MB drive and in the Bios it is marked as the boot drive. I have a SATA150, 160MB D drive also along with some SCSI hard drives. Also, if I have the SCSI hard drives identifyed by the SCSI controller on startup, it will try to boot from one of them and fail also. If the disc isn't in a drive, the message I get in any case is "DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER". If I put the disc in and press enter it still does't boot until I "Ctrl Alt Delete" and reboot the computer, it then boots OK.
I thought it might be the boot.ini file but that appeared to be OK, I did make some minor change to it a couple of times but it didn't help. Dave

[GaryRouth]

Are you absolutely sure you have the Boot Order set to the hard drive in the Bios? If it has always had this trouble, it doesn't seem that the current order is quite right.

Might take a look in the motherboard manual for your board, just to see if there's something unique to your model that you might have missed.

. . . and, is the SATA-150 hard drive still on the first Master SATA controller (hasn't been switched by accident)?

. . . Gary

[p.s. ...if you suspect that your boot.ini file might be set up a little off, you could take a look at it with SysEdit, or try one of the bootfix routines available from the XP Recovery Console]

[hagatha]

I just completed a new build and had the same thing happen. I ended up disconnecting all the drives from the MoBo except the boot drive and booting it that way. After it had done a completed shutdown and boot from the boot drive. I shut down and connected it all back up and it worked just fine.... I don't know what I did exactly, but it worked....

hagatha

[autotran]

Gary, thanks for the response. I had IDE drives for my first (120GB) and second (40GB) disc and I changed my 1st drive to the 250GB SATA. This is when it must have happened but I didn't realize it until I removed the XP disc from the CD drive. The BIOS definitely shows the 250GB as being the boot drive and it only shows the two SATA drives as being bootable, no mention of the SCSI drives. But, I do notice that the two SATA drives are listed as being drive 2 and drive 3, not 0 and 1 as you would expect. This leads me to believe that it is the boot.ini file that is the problem and I changed it a couple of times and neither time would the computer even start. I then used the Recovery Console to get my original boot.ini file back. I will look at these bootfix routines that you mention that are in the Recovery Console and see if one of them will do it. IF not, I can always do a XP repair after this and see if that will fix it. Dave

[autotran]

hagatha, I can try that too, maybe that might be the easiest way. Dave