My OS is win xp, w/ intel pentium and maxor HD. HARD drive by itself? boots up fine, but when i hook up cd-rom or floppy it wont boot and goes to that "problem booting up choose device and reboot bla bla" screen. I check bios and basically it DOESNT see hard drive if any other device is plugged in at same time. I think ive narrowed it down to hard drive. because no matter where i plug the jumper in, it only shows up as secondary slave. IE: plug jumper into DS master position and still shows it as slave
Does this problem sound familiar or repairable to anyone? or am i stuck having to REPLACE hard drive?It would help if you told use just what kind of computer you have.
Laptop? Desktop? Tower? SFF?
New? Old?
I will just assume you have a normal ATX motherboard that has dual chn IDE for the hard drive. Common practice is to put the HDD on one and the CD-Drive on the other. That way it always works, even it the devices are not pinned right.

So how do YU "plug-in" a floppy? Is this a laptop? Which?I also had the same problem with my DELL Optiplex GX260 which had a Maxtor Diamond Max Plus 8 40 GB hard drive. The hard drive was not recognized when CD and Floppy drives were connected at the same time. The only SOLUTION I found was to replace the hard drive. I swapped the hard drive with a hard drive out of one of my old systems. The DELL Optiplex GX260 now works fine and the hard drive is detected without a problem. It could also be a problem with your power supply in your system. You said that it only powers up the hard drive when you remove other devices? This shows it may be the power supply. The power supply may not be able to power up the hard drive because of the other connected drives.Thank You Geek I used dual IDE and everything is hunky dory. and next time i'll be sure to give all the proper info. thanx again for taking the time to help me.

WAR GEEK-9pm