Jumpers and Boot Order?

[joetheone]

Hey guys, i am in the process of building my parents a new computer. To cut costs, i re-used their old IDE HDD and DVD drive. Hoever, the mobo i bought for them ( http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813138106 ) is like most modern mobo's and only supports 2 IDE devices. I hooked up the HDD and DVD drive and set the DVD drive as master and the HDD as slave. Bios recognizes both correctly, but I was wondering if being the master device means that the DVD drive is ahead of the HDD in boot order? If i put my windows xp cd in the drive, will it boot straight from that?


Thanks

 

[godless]

boot order is somewhere else in bios. leave it the way it is.

 

[joetheone]

Well the thing is the hard drive still has their old copy of xp on it, so when it tries to boot from the HDD it gives me a BSOD, so i need to boot from the DVD drive first to re-format the drive. right?

 

[godless]

whenever you replace the mobo you need to reinstall windows for it to work. cause all the old drivers from mobo are still present, and this conflict will cause bsod.

 

[Paperdoc]

Root of your problem is, as godless says, Windows needs a re-install to replace all the drivers. But before you do that, let's fix the connections you did.

First of all, which device is the boot device is set in BIOS settings, and has nothing to do with Master and Slave. Most would advise that you make the HDD the Master. (By the way, that also means it is preferred that the HDD be on the END connector on the ribbon cable, and the DVD on the middle one.) Set the jumpers on the HDD to Master, and on the DVD to Slave.

When you turn on the machine, you usually hold down the "Del" key to enter the BIOS setup routines. The first screens will figure out which devices are connected as Master and Slave, and a bunch of other stuff. But in another screen you will set manually which device should be the first choice for boot device, plus alternatives. Usually, you want to boot from your HDD. But often they are set up so it will try to boot from the floppy first (if you have one), then the DVD player, and lastly the HDD. That way if you put nothing in the floppy or DVD drives it will check them and proceed to the HDD. But if you do insert a bootable disk in the DVD drive, if will boot from it and never even get to the HDD.