installed new motherboard

[acejefrey]

installed motherboard but when PC goes thru POST and begins to seach for Masterboot record, first Drive 0.. not found, then Drive 1.. not found, then HD... OK, then I'm left with a blinking cursor. I've tired using the re installation OS disk even installed a Floppy to try to boot from there, still no success. What may I have missed...??

[apristel]

Enter your bios settings and check the boot order, you'll probably want this order:
1 - Floppy
2 - CD-ROM
3 - HDD

Now try booting up off of your Windows cd or floppy.

[acejefrey]

thank you everso for the advice however, in the setup window I have tried every sequence of the devices I have. I have also 2 HD I've swapped in and out, both have XP on it, but I think the MBR files are messed up on both. I wanna reformat them and reinstall XP but I can't get past the window showing the AMBIOS System Configuration.. on the bottom all it does after displaying ' Searching for master record on IDE-0... OK ', is a blinking cursor

[apristel]

Can you manually enter the Hard Drive infromation instead of having them automatically detected? The information is usually on the sticker that is on the hard drive, (cylinders, sectors, etc.) Just setup your hard drive and put none for the other ide spots EXCEPT for the CD-ROM Drive. If you have your cd-rom on the same cable as the hard drive make sure all your jumpers are set (master/slave) The last connection on the cable is usually the master.
If you can use 2 ide cables, hook the hard drive up on the primary ide channel, set its jumper to master... hook the cd-rom up on the secondary ide channel and set its jumper to master also. Hook both hdd/cdrom to the last connector on the ide cables.. (ide cables are the flat ribbon cables, by connectors I mean the black things that plug into the hard drive or cd-rom)

If you have a boot disk (floppy) you can try not even hooking up a cd-rom and only setting up your single hard drive and putting NONE or disabled for the rest of the ide channels. And then make sure your boot order has Floppy has the first boot device. and see if you can boot from the floppy.