[Jay@Dub-00]

I have two HDD's installed: C (200Gb sata) which is the main one with O/S, and D (80Gb IDE) a storage drive, I have had this set up for a few months now.
I replaced a faulty CD drive and as doing so caused a spark when reconnecting the power plug (because I was a tit and didn't switch off mains power). The PSU went off and when I hit the on button it booted up with "NTLDR is missing hit ctrl+alt+del to restart". I have now found that it is trying to boot from the storage drive (D) I have to select which drive to boot from to run Windows (C), I can't seem to change this in the BIOS - it just reverts to D again, I have now disconected the power cable and as D is not there anymore, it boots normally from C.
How can I have my storage drive back - have I killed it?
emachines e4216, 3.0 GHz Pentium 4 dual core, 2 Gb RAM, XP Pro SP3.

I just noticed it says PATA on the label of the storage drive (D) - never heard of that one, It has what appears to be an IDE connection though.

[BG-0]

ATA, PATA and IDE are basically just the same thing/various different names and... Agh. Just... All the old drives that aren't SATA can be recognized by those names.

I would try replacing the CMOS battery if you keep losing your settings from BIOS. Also, you may need not only set the SATA drive as the primary, you could also need to set Native PATA/IDE/whatever to Native SATA mode.

[Jay@Dub-00]

Don't know what Native SATA mode is, CMOS batt changed not too long ago but no problems with time/date or other settings anyway. - Thanks for your reply.

[Jay@Dub-00]

I was being a tit again... I wasn't changing the boot order, I was using cursor keys instead of -/+ keys - should have read the info panel!!!
Strangely the system seems to boot quicker now too