Well that error is because the drive is not formated yet.
Man, I hope you aren't really comptia certified, if so give it back.
If he gets that error it means the boot to cd ISN'T working and it's going straight to the HD or he doesn't have a good cd/reader! It doesn't matter what port his HD's are in or even have anything to do with HD's. You can even boot the windows installer off CD without a hard drive in the system.
Work the problem from the beginning, not the middle. What's the first thing you should see when installing XP on a new HD after POST? Either 'Press anykey to start setup' or an immediate message saying 'Windows is checking yada yada yada' or whatever the messages actually are.
What model board do you have? As long as you set the optical drive as first boot device, there is nothing else you can do, if you don't get a 'Press anykey to start setup" or whatever, you'r optical drive is either bad or the MB ide port is bad, or the jumper on the drive is set wrong. If the bios sees the drive the jumpers aren't the problem, it's either bad media or drive.
It won't matter what ide port or master/slave you have set, you can boot from any of them.
Try the cd in another computer to see if it boots.
Also completely unrelated to your actual problem but brought up by some other dude, your ram can be bad even if it doesn't beep on boot, the bios check is a very BASIC test of memory worthiness, always run memtest if you suspect ram issues, this is most certainly not your problem however.