I installed a spare IDE HD as a slave drive using a power connector and a flat ribbon connector that has no twists in the individual wires to the mother board. Every time I boot, it is active and loads up with over 3MB of OS booting software. Using the Windows XP self-contained partitioning software or other partitioning software, if I clean the slave IDE HD of everything, it again reloads with over 3MB of OS booting software on a fresh reboot. My BIOS lists the IDE HD as a slave drive, but on the BIOS Boot menu it still lists as a 3rd boot drive. First boot drive is the CD/DVD drive so that in case of a crash I can boot from a CD emergency disk. Second boot drive is the PC's original SATA HD. I want to remove my IDE HD from the BIOS as a boot drive, but don't know how. I think if I can do that, the drive will not load with the system files, but remain empty for any files I move to it. I have a spare ribbon connector that has one twist of 7 individual wires twisted into one end connector. It is labeled for a 3.5 floppy drive. Would using it eliminate the slave IDE HD as a boot drive in the BIOS. I am afraid to try using it in case it would short out the mother board. Would a device that converts an IDE HD to a SATA connection work. I could then connect the IDE HD to the mother board with a SATA connecton. I don't know whether this would eliminate the BIOS listing it as a 3rd boot drive. I have googled myself dizzy trying to solve this. Any ideas would be appreciated.

Hello and welcome to PC Help Forum.

Could you set first boot the SATA HDD,then CD/DVD rom drive.

Set SICS auto detect and auto detect hard drives.

Is the IDE HDD jumpers set to slave?

Thank you jelly bean for trying to help me. Yes, the slave drive has the jumper in proper place. It is recognized in the BIOS as a slave. I don't see how switching the boot order of the CD/DVD drive and the SATA drive could solve my problem. If my computer crashed I would not be able to use an emergency CD to boot. I am trying to eliminate my IDE drive from being a boot drive in my BIOS. I don't know what your comment means: What is SICS auto detect?

Auto detect the drives as in CD/DVD roms HDDs ETC.

You can always go back into BIOS at a later date and change first boot device back to CD/DVD rom