GA-EP45-UD3P - Will Not Boot from IDE HD

dont even bother with ide it will bottleneck the rest of the system. sata 1TB drives are starting to drop below $100. worst comes to worst youll have to spend some money on a cheep/ superior drive. so dont sweat it ;> )

Jumpers set right on the drive(Master), plugged into the cable correctly(the last plug), you have added the drive to the boot order in the BIOS, (This is important especially on SATA boards, as they will not detect bootable drives until you add the device to the list)

This is a good thing - it gives us a baseline. Are you using the old cable that was in the old system, or did you use the new cable included with the MOBO? If you haven't disturbed any jumpering, going back to the old cable should work, as is. If you have re-jumpered, as I have no idea how much you know aabout IDE jumpering in general, I'll do the tutorial -

Here's an IDE cable:
M|----------|------|D
M1---------2-----3D
The 'M' end is the motherboard connector; the 'D' end goes to the drives.
There are two kinds of cables: 'standard' (on which the drives are jumpered to identify them), and 'cable select' (on which the cable itself sorts out the drive IDs).
If there are no labels (often, a large plastic or fabric 'pull-tab') saying 'master' and 'slave' on connectors 2 and 3, you have a 'standard' cable - jumper as follows:
it doesnt matter what connector goes to what; your primary (boot) HDD will need to be jumpered as 'master' [MSTR] on the drive; your secondary (or ODD) gets jumpered as 'slave' [SLV] on the drive.
If there are labels saying 'master' and 'slave' on connectors 2 and 3, you have a 'cable select' cable - jumper as follows:
Both drives get jumpered as [CSEL] on the drive; your primary (boot), or only, in the case of just one,drive goes on connector 3, which should be labeled 'master'; your secondary (or ODD) goes on connector 2, which should be labeled 'slave'; connector 1 goes to your MOBO IDE port...

Now, boot, do a <DEL> to get into the BIOS, and go to the 'Integrated Peripherals' page - set 'Onboard SATA/IDE Device' to 'Enabled'; set 'Onboard SATA/IDE Ctrl Mode' to 'IDE'; go to the 'Advanced BIOS Features' page, select 'Hard Disk Boot Priority', and hit <ENTER>; select your boot drive from the list; set 'First Boot Device' to 'CDROM', 'Second Boot Device' to 'Hard Disk', and you should be good to go...

No, that's only for SATA drives. My guess is you had a bad install, everything else looks right. If you don't have another copy to test try installing Kubuntu etc. temporarily. It will let you know if it was a bad install of XP.

By the way I'm an idiot....

Here's the pricepoint:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] d%20higher

I should have told you to try CS if master didn't work. All cables are cable select, it's how the drive is strapped. Some drives need to be strapped master single and master with slave as opposed to just master. I have run into the drive that didn't want to work as set and used CS, but it was a while ago. I didn't think about it, because you had it running on another machine and, if I remember correctly, the drive shows up in BIOS all screwy. I guess not in all cases. Also, you said you got it to load, which should have presented problems.

Well we did mention jumpers, starting with jitpublisher. So it wasn't a master/CS strap problem it was strapped for slave. Well that will cause all kinds of problems and a lot of times will make it show up in BIOS screwy, but a lot of times not.

Well you learned something new, so all's well that ends well.

Your right these days it's SATA. The PATA will be the next thing they strip from the mobos.

sorry I didn't explain... I have a ReadyNAS Duo by Netgear that currently hosts all of my files (documents/music/videos) i bought it because I have an xbox and I was streaming my dvd backups from my computer and I was looking into buying a new HD (about 6 months ago) and I found this cool thing... streams to my xbox and holds my backups... got it with 2x500GB HD(Newegg deal)

anyways I figure if I'll upgrade my NAS to 2x1.5TB RAIDX and put my 2x500GB RAID 1 in my desktop and I'll be done with IDE

oh yeah the only "Netgear approved 1.5TB drives are the Seagate ST31500341AS 1.5TB you listed..

I didn't know they were the only ones.. i guess I didn't look outside the recommendations... I think that the guys over at ReadyNas.com are testing out the WD 2TB Green Drives... Previously I looked into the smaller green drives, but they have disk spin down issues... well if I can get away with some leftovers for a few months we'll see what the market does... If I have some patience I don't have to put all my DVDs on the NAS... it's just convient and keeps my disks away from abuse (college kids)