Ok guys, I think ive tapped all my possible sources for this, any help would be greatly appreciated. I recently purchased a seagate 250GB hdd as a storage drive. I currrently have a 120GB Maxtor SATA hard drive and needed for room. Well my friend decided to help me install the seagate drive........... :lol:.....i hooked up the hard drive and he wanted to use the program "discwizard" by seagate, I figured he knew something about computers. Well.....he ran it.....the drive was recognized and everything worked fine until i restarted my comp. Upon loading up, it said that "error loading OS".....I disconnected my second hard drive and it started up fine. I then emailed seagate and they said that it must have changed my Master boot record......(ok....i can fix that)...I made a dos boot disk, loaded it up and it froze at A:> wouldnt let me type anything let alone fix it.......(well hmmmm thats a downer)....I ran a virus scan and it came up clean. I have some clutter on my comp that I might as well get rid of anyways so i was going to do a reinstall of windows, burned some files to a cd and got ready to reinstall. I went into the bios and made the cd the first boot device. I restarted with the xp cd in the cdrom and it loaded NORMALLY!!!It didnt even say to press a button to boot from it. I am running Xp SP2 right now. While I am stuck and I think i have tried everything to redo this P.O.S. What really bugs me is i built it about 4 months ago and it ran cherry until now :banghead: . Well thank you guys for your time, UNI guy

? Welcome to PCHF


So what your saying is if you boot from the CD it runs normally but if you boot from the hard drive it wont? Just making sure.
Does your PC recognize the drive through your disk management? Maybe it is not initialized?

My main hard drive boots fine. Its when i try to boot from the cd that i run into problems. I changed my bios to boot from cd, and it still loads and boots from the hard drive. When i unplug all hard drives and boot from cd, it boots into the setup screen. I thought about installing my OS on the second hard drive(ide) but when i hook it up and boot to cd it says "NTLEADER missing" and it wont boot from the cd. I am very perplexed by this and the fact that i cant reformat my d*** computer. Thanks guys.

Ok I am postive I got a fix for you but I need to know if you did an upgrade or not?

but here is what Micro$oft has to say about it.


http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;320397

I am running service pack 2 but have not done any repair installs or anything (partly because it wont let me)....I am trying to set up a boot disk but cannot find the boot.ini file that it says I need. i have the bcupdate application but am not sure how to use it even if i can get into setup mode or dos thanks guys

Ok what your going to have to do is format XP in Fat32. Then it will boot up but then if you dont want fat32 you will have to format again to NTFS. This will fix your bootloader. Unless you have a copy of Knoppix live cd? Its a linux OS