XP won't boot without slave?

Sounds like you have somehow got the MBR on the slave drive ..

1. remove the slave drive

2. insert your windows xp disk into your Cd/DVD drive

3. start your system, hopefully it will boot from the CD if not you will need to press something like F12 at the start and select your CD/DVD drive from the list.

4. when xp has finished doing its usual stuff select R this will start the recovery console

5. Select your operating system from the list - There should only be one to select

6. when you have the DOS like display and a prompt type in the following fixmbr then hit enter.

7. when its done type in exit and hit enter

8. reboot your system and you should be back in business.

NB: Microsoft do say that under certain circumstances this procedure can cause you to lose ALL data on the hard drive, but the don't actually say what those circumstances are so use at your own risk.

That is because some how the master boot record is on the slave drive and not on drive c; You would need to take your Windows XP CD, boot it and fix the master boot record of c: Did you jumper the second hard drive as a slave drive. Make sure BIOS is et only for the Primary Hard drive.

Think Horses not Zebras... it might be much more simple a solution than

the suggestions above.

Some make/model drives have different jumper settings on the master drives

there are separate settings for "Master or Single" & "Master with Slave present"

You need to check the jumper settings on BOTH drives.

I've seen computers that operated for a year or more with the jumpers set wrong

and then one day decided not to.... and wouldn't run again until the jumpers were set right.

AD

It kind of sounds like the BIOS might be a little confused.

Try going to your pc's manufacturers web site and find the drivers for it in the Support section and look for one that will "flash the bios".

I'm not sure that will fix your problem but if sure sounds like the bios doesn't really know what it's looking for.

Hope this helps.