A SATA hard drive can be seen by the BIOS as an IDE drive depending on how it was initially setup...
Most optical drives will be recognised as ATAPI no matter if they are IDE or SATA drives so no worry there...
Why are you fishing around in the BIOS and is this why it will not boot ? ?
First thank you for your response, ok i began to have problems with the pc, it had become unstable, so following advice from the microsoft site, i re-installed the os,it seemed solve the problem of unstability however the fan began racing and upon reboot it would not allow cd/dvd repair due to "checksum(s) not matching", so i abandoned the cd method, ran chk dsk and 2 passes with mem diag. tool (no prob. with either), restarted and it would not boot at all! the error said the HAL DLL was missing or corrupt. so i puchased a new hard drive and am now at this point, upon powering up, the screen looks like this:
GATEWAY
INTEL BOOT options F10
BIOS settings F2
it will not go past that screen and pressing either option does nothing, restarting w/ ctrl+alt+del then pressing f2 brought up a new screen, "boot agent" and that is where i saw the connections in my original post, if i have somehow pushed the wrong button at the wrong time and all is lost i would be crushed so i hope there is a solution to this problem.
