cmos problem??

[rob stanford]

hi everyone, im a new user on this forum so i hope someone can help!!

i have just formatted a friends hard drive in order to install winxp, as his previous o/s was corrupt. after formating for some reason i could not get the cd rom drive to boot (or the cdrw). i tried everything i know, but nothing would work!!

i keep getting the error message "invalid system disk please replace" even when there is no disks in any of the drives, including the floppy drive!!!

i tried the setup commands from win98 boot disk (floppy) and get the message "cdr101 not ready reading (drive letter)".

finaly, i enterd the cmos setup and the drives showed the following:

primary master: hard drive
primary slave:none
secondary master:none
secondary slave:none

yet i know that the cd rom and writer drives were fine before i formatted the hard drive!!

i really don't understand whats going on, ichecked that the ide cables were connected correctly and they appeared to be, so what could this be, and how do i fix it??? i would be very gratefull if anyone could offer any ideas. i have intermediate computer skills/knowledge.

thanx in advance...
rob.

[MrGuru]

when you turn on the computer you get the message invalid system disk when no disk in any drive means no data on harddrive use a bootdisk ...
the problem with cdrom could be it needs a driver and when you formated the harddrive you deleted it... some cdroms work thru bios and others drivers... try using generic cdrom support on the floopy disk