a weird problem

[nicolaus corelius]

so a computer was brought to me with a "boot device not found" error message. apparently the bios couldnt find the mbr on the hdd. i reformatted the thing, installed new windows. it worked once then did the same thing again when it was turned off and turned back on .
now the weird thing is that when i boot from the xp cd and go to recovery console i can see the hdd fine.
now...if i set the cd as the first boot device and then skip it by not pressing the key, the windows starts up. btw, i did do fixmbr