Hi guys, got it working again. I copied ntldr,ntdetect, and boot.ini from an XP installation on my laptop to a floppy and put it into desktop pc and it kind of sorted itself out. I have always had trouble booting the desktop PC in that on first boot it comes up with" autodetecting primary master- Press f4 to abort" and will go no further until I do a REBOOT after which it is perfect, been trying to sort this for ages with no luck though it has always worked like this till recently. I am booting from a 400 GB primary with jumpers set correctly as master and cable is correctly configured, I also have a 120 slave drive hard disc USED only for storing files. Thanks , JimOn most recent PC's there are 2 IDE channels ...
Refer to your MBoard specs to see which is which.
HDD's should be ideally on IDE0 with optical drives on IDE1....
Or Hdd's on IDE1 and optical on IDE2...different manuf. label them differently.

With them jumpered accordingly here is the correct cable layout:


MB===========================Slave======Master.Hi Patio, thanks for replying, that is how MINE is, HDD is IDE 0 and cable fitted as your diagram, just opened this afternoon to triple check it, Jim.I've seen this before and also put up with it as you are doing ...could never find what bugger in the BIOS was causing it...but you may WANT to put a new CMOS battery in there and see...Part# CR2032 available anywhere.
Remove all power when replacing it. Hi Patio, funnily enough I had wondered about that. When I got desktop PC to work again today after about a 10 days and it has been plugged into mains all this time, when I went into the BIOS it had lost about 2 hours from the correct time, cheers , Jim.Best of Luck...again you're on the right TRACK !