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HD Specs: Hitachi Deskstar 80GB HDS728080PLAT20 IDE/ATA I would really appreciate help. I've been trying to solve this problem for the last 3-5 days. HD was working flawlessly as "slave" then i decided to make it primary and install XP on it. I wiped hard drive with dban. Rebooted with xp installation cd and started the process ( i have installed xp before so many times) XP copied files to the HD and rebooted Here, the hard drive is supposed to boot so that the GUI part of xp installation starts The problem is that i get a "Disk Boot Failure. Insert system disk and press Enter". So i am not being able to boot from the drive to continue the installation. I searched Google for this problem and tried everything. ( BIOS boot order, jumper settings, IDE cables swap, recovery console: fixboot, fixmbr, bootcfg \rebuild..... I also made a floppy startup disk with the following files on it : NTDRL, boot.ini, ntdetect.com This will allow those files to be copied to the HD and force it to boot. Too bad this also did not work and i got this error: " Windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem.Could not read from the selected boot disk. Check boot path and disk hardware.Please check the Windows documentation about hardware disk configuration and your hardware reference manuals for additional information." Also googled this problem and tried everything and still NO GO!! Problem persists. In addition, I booted Hitachi's Feature tool and set UDMA mode max to 5(someone said it solved his problem on a forum). This also did not solve the problem. All HD testing tools are giving the HD a healthy state (it passed all tests). The puzzling thing is that the HD works perfect as "slave" in my second machine. I was able to access it and copy to/from it.