Boot not recognizing CDRW?

Hi. I'm using old pc parts of mine to put together a pc. My problem is that whenever I plug in the IDE Hard Drive into the primary ide port and the cdrw into the secondary ide port the pc won't boot, giving me a "problem with current config" or something like that.

Anyway, when I unplug the cdrw from both ribbon cable and power, then it boots up fine. Bear in mind I already had the os Win xp home edit. installed along with all my old programs etc.

Does anyone know why this is happening? I used to have a cdrw and dvdrw working from this hard drive so I don't know what affect that may have had.

Thanks for any input, Randy

 

make sure the secondary cd drive is set as a slave

 

you want a one HDD and one CD player set up? and both on different channels? make sure you set them both to master or single .. depending on the manufacter it's different but it usually says on top of the drive

also if you installed XP onto that HDD but a different config it can cause problems as you're really not supposed to do that ... so if you could say what the original config was if that is of any relavence

 

try goin in the bios and selecting 'fail safe defaults', assuming ya got an award bios. Either way most have that option, unless its a $h|tty OEM motherboard from compaq or someone. Do that and see if that works. if not, then try a different ide cable...if thats not it i dont know....

 

sorry... Misread it!