hrmm...well the jumper settings are different on most drives, but if you checked them they should be okay.

It could be a bad IDE cable maybe? I was having some problems one day until i realized my IDE cable was old and falling apart. Although I guess your HD probably came with a new one your using.

I would suggest trying each of the drives seperatly to see if you can get it to work with one and not the other, then you can tell if it's a problem with the drive.

Yea, I checked the drive with a utility that came in the WD floppy. It said there were no errors. Earlier today (like 6 hrs ago lol) I set my hdd with XP Pro as the master and nothing as slave and it worked fine. So I think the IDE cable is ok. It did come with a new one, but I'm using the one that I got with my first hdd. I think I might try setting the jumpers to single or cable select and use just the empy hdd and see if it would work then. Hopefully that would work.. except what would I do to dual boot lol. Anyway, I'll keep you posted. Thanks for your responses, I may need you again in a hour though lol.

OMFG !!! I stilll get Invalid System Disk error. Even when I set one hdd as master and use cable select ! I'm really frustrated lol I've been doing this all day... There has to be something.. I just don't know what in the world it could be. AHH!

right now your system is not booting from cd or floppy disk, you need to enter the bios setup on boot by pressing F2 then change the device boot order, to have it load optical or cdrom drive before your HD. Make sure you have no floppy in the drive and once you are done save bios changes and exit the machine will reboot, and will now read your cdrom drive before your HD that will at least get it to read from the mandrake CD. but from your original post it sounds like it may be the cdrom drive itself, becuase I missed it until I was typing his, but you said XP Pro CD gave you the same error. It may be a bad CD drive, that's just a suggestion. if you have another around, or don't mind pirating the one from your dell as a test drive, swap out the one currently in the system. also you can try the connection cables again make sure they are all inserted properly, ie red stripe to pin one, all the way in etc... also if they are not currently on seperate ide busses try putting the HD on bus one and the CDrom on bus two. and make each the master of it's own bus. but it sounds to me like a drive failure possibly. good luck let us know what happens.

--Alex

one other thing I noticed, is that you're trying to get cable select to work, for that to happen both drve jumpers need to be set to cable select, and then each connector on the ide cable corresponds to a master and slave I can't remember which connector indicates which. but I believe it is the closer one is master and one at end of cable is slave but llook it up to make sure.

--Alex

Yea I know about booting from CD-ROM, I've been doing that the whole time. And like I stated in my earlier post I have the two hdd's on the primary IDE chain and the cdrom and dvd drive on the secondary IDE chain. When I was talking about cable select, I meant I was not doing master/slave.. just one hdd with the jumper setting as cable select.

XP does boot correctly, it starts the setup. Linux is not doing anything though, I keep getting the "Invalid System Disk" error. Any other suggestions ? Thanks.

both drives need to have cable select set

--Alex

Thanks a lot. I think it was a jumper problem. Because I was setting the jumpers up as one being master and the other slave (and then plugging in the IDE cable to master/slave respectively). I know for sure that my computer supports cable select and I didn't know you could set both hdd's as cable select and then the IDE cable as master/slave.

Ok, after all that rambling. It still doesn't work. I think it is a problem with my CD-ROM drive. The XP Pro CD boots but none of my burned mandrake cd's work.

Oh yea, I checked the settings in my BIOS and it recognized both hdd's correctly. So if this is a CD-ROM issue and someone is sure about it lol (cant fork over much money now) please tell me one that would (should) work. I'm looking at the Memorex 52x32x52 CD-RW. I'm confused why mine wouldn't work though. Hmm. Heres what I have:

I/O Magic 40x12x48 CD-RW

To me the only difference is how fast it writes to disc. I'm sort of baffled why I would need a new one. I just bought it 2 and a half months ago. Thanks for all your help so far. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

maybe you could try burning the cd's again at slower speed, it seems to me that if the CD-ROM drive can recognize the XP CD, then it should recognize any other CD. Have you burned any other material with burner before, does it work properly? If so you know the burning is ok, but sometimes when burning at high speeds, some CD's have problems, plus make sure the cds you're using are the proper speed rated. If the cd works in another computer, well let's just say if that computer is the only one that it doesn't work in. It is either the drive ( in which case beore buying a new CDROM, try to obtain one you can just swap out to verify that it is the CDROM) or that one computer is from the twilight zone. YOu really have one baffling problem man. One other thing make sure you use a CD-r not CD-rw and that you finalize CD upon writing. Your CDROM drive shoould be able to read a disc with Linux even if it can't burn, CDROM drives all read the same. IF it's not a physical prob with the drive it's probably not the drive, and you won't know for sure unless you swap out the drive. But good luck



--Alex