I've seen this when the BIOS is very outdated but more often on a clean XP install and the motherboard driver package has not been installed. I can't tell from your post exactly how you installed XP.
Bob
I built my first pc using the following;
Asus A8N-SLI SE motherboard
1 gig of corsair value ram
AMD athlon 3200+
wd 160gb caviar se wd1600
seagate barracuda 7200.7 200gb ultra ata st200822a
maxtor diamondmax 10 6v300f0 sata 3.0gb
samsung hd400lj 7200/8m 3gb
running xp pro
During my initial attempt to instal windows on either of my sata drive I received the following error messages;
windows could not start because of a computer disk harware configuration problem. Could not read from the selected boot disk. Check boot path and disk hardware.
I installed xp using my old ata drive and things were fine until I noticed one or both drives will disappear if certain usb ports are in use while rebooting. Is this similar to an IRQ conflict? I don't see any errors in my device manager. I bought vista but thought I should try and solve this issue first so I can run it on a sata drive.
Thanks for your help - I know I need it.
Chris

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