Hi guys
I have this weird problem.

I installed XP on an IDE hard drive on a QDI Advance 10T motherboard

After instrallation, if I have just that Hard Drive attached as Primary Master (Or the Hard Drive plus a CDROM) then XP boots no problem and the HDD is C: as normal in windows XP

But as soon as I add another HDD as a Secondary Master or Slave (CDROM disconnected) the PC always boots from that drive instead, even though DIsk 1 is the only HDD option set in the BIOS boot

I tried that with a second HDD that has Windows 98 on it and also another one that has a bad copy of XP on it (sticks in boot-reset loop). The PC always insists on booting frpm the second drive.

I then added a non bootable drive as a slave and found the PC will not boot at all, after the POST screen it goes to a blank black screen and doesn't come back.

Also there is a BIOS option that says 'Boot Other Device'. If I disable that the PC will not boot from the XP hard drive at all even if it is the only drive on the system

See pics.

So what is going on??? 😕

The reason I do this by the way, if I want to install Windows 98 on a PC, I normally boot it from a Windows XP hard drive first (or install a clean copy of XP)
Then I fit a slave drive formatted FAT32
Then I boot from XP again and copy all the required drivers from USB stick to the FAT32 Drive
Finally I install Windows 98 on another hard drive and of course once it is installed the USB ports will not recognise USB sticks but it doesn't matter as I can reconnect the FAT32 Hard drive which already has all the driver files on it and 'Bob's Your Uncle' as they say..... for some reason.

If I messed up I can fit the XP boot drive again and copy more drivers from USB to the FAT32 drive. I have loads of IDE hard drives lyingf around so this convoluted sounding process is actually really quite easy and quick for me.