HELP! Reboot and Select proper Boot device

Ok. I have two hard drives (master/ slave) that I want to use with my new p4 desktop. I cleared everything off the hard disks, and reinstalled Windows XP. When I sticked the hard drives in, the computer gave me this screen after the bios: Reboot and Select proper Boot device or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device. I've tried inserting the OS disc inside the cd drive, but it wouldn't even take me to windows installation, so it won't boot from the disc. Right now, I am trying to break down the steps by first installation ONE hard disk. This hard disk has Jumper: J50 and the pins look like this: 1 2 3 0 5 6 7 8 9 10 0 = no pin A website told me how to change the pins to master/slave/ Cable select/ master w/ CLJ …etc I do not understand what Master w/ CLJ means I tried booting the computer with Master w/ CLJ. The bios DETECTED the hard drive, but I STILL GET the Reboot and Select proper Boot device or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device. message. I want to be able to either access the Windows XP setup installation screen from booting from the disc, or to get the hard drive to boot Windows XP. Oh, and my bios is American Megatrends, if that info is needed. Can anyone help? Thanks, Andrew (AL) P.S. You may also contact me through email, which is [removed]

The way I read your post is that one hard drive is installed, it currently lack an operating system and you want to boot off the windows XP CD to install the operating system. Sounds like the computer is trying to boot off the hard drive and is then hanging up. Suggest you go into BIOS setup on startup and look for a boot order setting. Make sure the CD Drive is before the Hard drive in the boot order. If you format the drive with the CLJ or AC jumper then the drive capacity will be limited to 32GB. This is for use with older motherboards where the BIOS cannot deal with drives larger then 32GB. How old is this computer, and what is the date of its BIOS? A pentium 4 motherboard should not have any problems unless the drives are more then 137G. That can cause problems with some BIOS or disk controllers. How large are the drives you are trying to install?

Its not booting because there is no active partition.

Go to http://www.bootdisk.com and get the Windows 98 startup disk. Boot up and when you to the prompt type help (or /help) and it will list the commands you can use. There are several "boot" commands, try them to repair the MBR. (fixboot /mbr is the command you want)