Problem with new computer

Got the new asus board a8n-sli deluxe. I have flashed the bios already to newest version. I had 2 hard drives in the system ide 200gb and a new 200gb sata hard drive. Well in the new drive(sata) i installed windows, but the ide drive that just has data on it music/videos ect is showing up as C:. THe drive with windows on it is the (sata). A small annoyance no biggie but when i boot up i have to have a bootable cd in cd drive or my pc will not boot. Get no system disk error. Well in the bios I have the sata hd as main boot hd. Then boot order is floopy cd hard drive. SO i have to have this dumb asus cd in cd drive to be able to boot its crazy.

If I was you, I would do exactly this. Before I continue, I'm assuming a reinstallation of windows is not out of the question.

Anyways, it seems to be that the critical files needed to boot normally are either not accessible to the bootloader or there is an underlying driver issue as well. What I would first try and do, is unplug your data drive(either the power or IDE cable) and just have the SATA drive operational. Pop in the windows cd, make sure all neccessary third party drivers are installed when prompted during the hardware detection phase and that the SATA drive is being detected. Go through the install and when you reboot, make sure the drive settings for the SATA drive have a boot flag and is the first primary partition in the mbr. After you can boot without the cd, go ahead and reattach the ide drive and configure it accordingly. Windows automatically sets the drive letter for a block device so that it does not conflict with one already in use, that being the SATA drive hopefully with the drive letter C:.

If you are unable to reinstall windows for any reason, make sure in the device manager that the correct SATA controller drivers are installed, as well as all the drivers that came with your mobo. Turn on and off settings for the SATA drive one at a time as well to see if those are preventing a normal boot. I hope this helps, and good luck.

Well for some reason the PC needs to boot form the data drive c: even tho i didnt install windows on that drive and it used to be just a slave data drive. i have no damn clue why or how that drive got to be the boot drive. Even in windows it says the sata is the boot partition gahhh can partiton magic fix this?

Partition magic can be used to modify an existing MBR, but since its windows xp, I would gravitate towards utilizing the recovery console for your problem. Re-installing or repairing windows might be your only fix, so back up your data before you make any changes!

Try partition magic's bootloader. It ROCKS. I have a very very old dos version, part240 ....... I can boot anything i like.

id just hate to have to install all new drivers again. Reinstall games/programs this will be the 3rd time lol. what partition commands are avaiable on recovery console?