Unable to boot

hi i've been trying for 3 days now to boot into my computer which has windows xp on it…it detects all the hard disks and the page goes blank.i have a sata hard drive and an ide hard drive(if thats what we call it). when i tried reinstalling xp on it,the setup loads all files and gets struck in the page"windows is starting up". the motherboads is an asus k8vmx. The installation goes through when i unplug my sata hdd but detects the other hard disk as an unpartitioned drive. please dont tell me that my hard disk has gone bad. Ready to provide any info if someone can get me a solution.

Greetings and sorry for the delay. If you intend to install XP on a SATA drive you need the SATA drivers from Asus to load when XP prompts for F6 to load drivers. As XP was developed prior to SATA XP in and of itself cannot recognize SATA drives. If you intend to install on the IDE drive then just tell setup to partition the drive.

hi thanks for the reply.i havent had any problems installing xp on my computer when i change the onboard settings to sata.i checked with one of my friends and seems like the sata cable in my hard drive is loose.he also gave me a relief that the data from my hard drive can retrieved.so everything seems to be going good.

Thanks for the update. Just to verify: you have resolved this issue?

will let you know the result tomorrow….my friend has taken my hard disk assuring that he would fix it….