Sata and Ide drives problem booting from wanted drive Win ..

Please excuse this lenghty question but I am trying to cover all the
configuration problems to assist with a diognosis.

I have a P/C with the following configuration.
1gb ddram, p4 3ghz, gigabyte mainboard, Sis chipset.
Two Ide Drives on Ide port 0, (master and slave)
a dvd burner and a third Ide drive on ide port 1 (master and slave)
Two sata 320gb drives on the on board SATA ports 0 & 1
I also have a SATA driver card (pci) and have a Sata DVD burner on
that port and a third sata HDD on the second port. I am unable to get
the system to boot if I have the sata dvd installed.

I know it is a lot of drives.

I had made the sata drive on port 0 the boot drive and I am using Win
XP-PRO.
Initially my Ide drive on port 0 (master) was the boot drive then
about six months ago I managed to get a recursive problem telling me
to re-register WIN-XP which I did but allways got told "it is
registered dont bother". I kept doing this but it finally counted
down to zero days left to register and got in an endless loop.

Since I needed more storage and wanted to keep the data on the old IDE
boot disk, I installed a SATA 320gb drive and re-installed Win XP-pro
using the new SATA drive as the boot disk. So far so good. I then
cleaned off the operating system on the ide drive 0 and used the extra
storage space.
I later added a second sata drive to port1 (on main board) still every
thing was fine.
I had one ide dvd burner and decided to add a second one and since I
had a spare SATA port I installed a Sata one. This is where the
trouble started. No matter what I did I was unable to get the system
to boot. If I used a linux boot disk I was able to see all the drives
and what was on them but no matter what I tried (selecting the sata 0
as the boot drive) I was unable to get the system to boot from that
disk unless I unplugged the sata dvd drive. I tried plugging the sata
drives in so that sata drive 0 went to port 0 on the main board and
when that failed to boot I then plugged it into port 0 on the addin
sata card. No matter what I do I am unable to get the system to boot
if I use the sata dvd-drive.
Finally I thought I would use the windows install disk to check the
boot sector but if I ran the disk from the new sata dvd drive it would
run so far and then give me the blue screen of death and tell me I may
have a virus.
If I booted with the win install cd in the old ide dvd drive then
Windows install would run. I finally decided to re-install XP on the
ide drive on port 0 (master). I still cannot get the system to work
with the dvd sata drive installed.

Can anyone offer some help.
JIM McCARDLE jmccardl.DeleteThis@bigpond.net.au
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