I believe I am in the right place, at LEAST I hope so.  My harddrive died so I moved the jumper on my slave drive to make it a master drive.  I followed the directions on the manufacturer's site.  Now what do I do?  I've tried to turn it on with the WinXP installation CD in the cd drive but I just get failure messages.  I haven't worked on a computer in over 10 years so I just don't remember what I have to do.  Is anyone able to give me some direction please?  I would really appreciate it.  Thanks so much.  This is a Dell DIMENSION 4300 and is probably 10 years old.  I don't remember.  I use a laptop for the most part.  I just wanted to fix the desktop for the grandkids to play games on.  You had two drives in the desktop?
You have to remove the drive that failed. The Master/Slave thing works for drives that are FUNCTIONAL. If a drive fails, its behavior is not predictable. You have to fully remove the drive, at least electrically. No cables connected to the bad drive.

The BIOS would recognize the second drive and let it be the boot drive. But you must set priority to LOOK for the CD first. When you let the CD boot you should see a message...
Press any key to boot CD...

You have to hit a key withing a few seconds.

You may need the product key at had, in some cases.
Full install may take over an hour. You will be prompted for some information at more the one point. So you can not just walk away. Thank you Geek.  I did remove the old hard drive and changed the jumper on the slave to make it master.  I put it in the slot where the master was and connected those cables to it.  When I boot up the pc I get failure messages and it keeps rebooting.  I'm not SURE why it is doing that.  Any ideas?  This is what it was doing when I thought that the master harddrive was fried.  Maybe it is the motherboard instead? Quote

When I boot up the pc I get failure messages and it keeps rebooting.  I'm not sure why it is doing that.