This problem I am having is extremely confusing to me, I have no idea what to do. My friend has a Dell Deminson 2400, He wanted me to reinstall windows (i have done this on his computer before with out any problems) So I formated his hard drive, put in the windows xp cd, and it would not be read, so i went into the boot menu and it only showed his HDD, so i rearanged them so that the Cd drive was his Primary master and his Hdd was his primary slave, it went into setup and i got it to install to his hdd, it finished , and booted from the cd again... so i went back into the boot menu and and now the only thing it would read is his cd drive, so i switched the order again so his hdd was prim master, and cd was prim slav, and it booted in to the xp setup off the hdd and then asked for the cd, it seems that only the Prim master is being read, so i tried to make the cd a secondary master and it booted and said there was no bootable drive. I have replaced all of the ide cables and tried ever jumper configuration that i can. This just seems impossible, so if anyone could help that would be great... Sorry that this post is so long.
How many IDE ports do you have on your motherboard? If you have 2, then simply install your hard drive on the primary IDE port as master and install the CD-ROM on the secondary IDE port as master. Make sure that the jumpers are set to master for both the hard drive and the CD-ROM. If you're using an IDE cable with 3 connectors, then make sure your drives are plugged into the last connector (middle connector is for slave).
Also check that cable. If it has a hole in it somewhere, it's a "cable select" cable and both drive jumpers must be set to csel.
