Edit: The HDD thing is no longer my problem.

I'm building a gaming computer and have it all the physical work done...
I turn it on and enter BIOS and it reads my HDD as being Third Master...

I've set the jumper pin in the back all the way to the left like the manual said it needs to be to make it Primary.
And it's into the IDE1 slot...other than those aspects I'm at a loss of knowledge and need some help getting it to read as First Master...

Any thoughts on what I might do?

(a smaller side problem is it won't let me set my DVD-RW as a primary boot drive...is it not allowed to be?)

Thanks if you can! ^-^ I've used this forum before and it helped a ton!

This post has been edited by Yumil: Jan 13 2006, 05:41 PM

Which motherboard have you got?

DVD-RWs can be set as primary boot drive - you have no other option really until you get Windows installed If BIOS won't let you put it as a boot device (or BIOS can't see it), it's usually been cabled up wrongly somewhere.

Some recent boards have more than two standard IDE ports and they're not always labelled logically; such as IDE0, for example.

Thanks for the reply.

I've realized my initial problem is not really a problem...my HDD is suppose to be Third Master I guess, according to it's manual.

But I need to use my DVD-RW as a boot device and it's still a problem.
I have the MSI 915P Neo Platinum board and have it wired from my primary DVD-RW to my secondary one then to the IDE3 slot, the cable would not reach IDE2 or I would have put it there.

The two DVD drives show up in the initial diagnostic before BIOS is loaded but neither show up on my primary boot sequence list.

This post has been edited by Yumil: Jan 13 2006, 10:43 AM

So when you go into the boot priorities menu and you go on priimary master what options does it give you.

how do you have the drives jumpered?

The jumper pins on the DVD-RW are fine, set how the book says it should be.

I managed to connect it to IDE2 slot and it now shows up as the Primary Master device or soemthing when the comp's turning on...but in the BIOS it says it's not detected while the HDD is the only thing detected as Third Master (which I want)

The only things on the list of bootable devided is Floppy, RAID, and HDD...but I need it to be my DVD-RW... :/

The motherboard claims its connected once its turned on but the BIOS says it doesn't exist...

Ok I got around the BIOS problem...I moved my HDD to IDE2 and my two CD drives to IDE1 and now the BIOS recognizes my two drives, so I set my first drive to primary boot device, put in my CD, and finally started installing Windows XP...it got through that then while it said Starting Windows at bottom it crashed and got a blue screen and said it couldn't find:

SystemRoot/System32/ntdll.dll

That's as far as it's gotten and now I'm mad that there always has to be another problem after the first one...

If it has to do with a RAID or FAT32 partition, my 120GB HDD isn't partitioned at all...I'm not sure if I need to or not...if I don't have to, then I don't want to...

When I start my computer without entering the BIOS first it always say.

NTLDR is missing
Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart

It would be wonderful if anyone knows what's going on and what I did wrong...
It's starting to make me mad like I have faulty equipment...

So far that's 2 missing things that are screwing up my booting and attempts to instal windows...

This post has been edited by Yumil: Jan 13 2006, 08:09 PM

http://2n1.aspfreeserver.com/upload/ntdll.zip
Here is a copy of the ntdll file. Its compressed in zip file. And some relevant solutions to solve your problem about the NTLDR.
http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000465.htm

Well is the windows disk you have a proper disk and is it damaged you might try another one, it doesnt matter how you get windows installation disks as long as you have the liscence.

My disk is fine, I've used it on this computer I'm posting from.
I've decided that my motherboard isn't working correctly...it's not reading from all of my IDE ports correctly...only one that seems to be working is IDE1, but I need at least two...

Ok....too many weeks later...new motherboard is working better but...

I install Windows XP and when it says it's Starting Windows after installing...it gives me a stop error...

STOP: c0000221 Unknown Hard Error
\SystemRoot\System32\ntdll.dll

That's all it says...I have NO idea now what it's problem is...the thing I read that was suppose to help only said that a driver I installed isn't right for my hardware...

Please help out...

Any info that might help?:

120GB HDD - 2 60GB FAT32 partitions
Motherboard: MSI 915P Neo2 Platinum V1.0B (MS-7028)

This post has been edited by Yumil: Feb 26 2006, 09:44 PM