I Dont know how I did it

[hobbiest24]

I was installing win xp pro on an older HP Pavilion xe743,  667mhz celeron,  20gbHD,  nothing special,  origanilly had win98.  i also have another similar pavilion system, close to the same specs.
no on to what I did,  I fully installed xp pro on the one,  the other I had to replace the hard drive, after doing so it would not load from the cd rom. so I tried the first system hard drive (the one that loaded sucessfully) and switched it to the one I was working on.  Well i used the working system and tried loading xp pro on the other hard drive.  now I have one computer,  and a 2 hard drive boot system,  did I forget to mention one hard drive is fat32  the other is ntfs, Both are needed for the computer to boot,or it will not boot.    does anyone know how or what I did?

[SuperDave]

Are we talking about one or two computers with problems?

[JJ 3000]

  the other I had to replace the hard drive, after doing so it would not load from the cd rom.

Was this a new or a used hard drive that wouldnt work?
Have you checked your jumper settings?

[hobbiest24]

I was fixing 2 hp pavilions.      the first 40gb one already had xp pro but so many viruses it wouldnt let me reinstall the os,  the second one 20gb had win 98.  the one with win 98 i sucessfylly upgraded.  i took the hard drive from the other (loaded with viruses) and tried loading a freash xp pro on it while it was hooked up on the secondary ide.  I have noticed that both drives are set to master on the jumper settings.
They are attached  20gb fat32 pri ide,  40 gb NTFS second ide,
Under disk management the 20gb says its system,  the 40 gb is labled boot
both are considered primary drives.

[JJ 3000]

So you want to install the 40 gig in one machine and the 20 gig in the other one? Is that right?

When you first  tried to install Xp on the 40 Gb drive was it the only hard drive that you had in the machine?

Did you boot to the windows disk or insert it after the old O.S. had already loaded?

[hobbiest24]

Yes I wanted the 40 in the slightly better machine, and the 20 in the other.

when the 40 was in the original comp it wouldnt let me boot from the cd rom, even with changing the boot in bios.

I think I have them set in some sort of raid format.  with it all together it runs super fast for only 667mhz celeron, and only 128 sd ram.

[JJ 3000]

That is odd. If you changed your boot order in BIOS and saved changes when you exited your hard drive should have been bypassed and  not had anything to do with your boot to the CD.
 
Did you hear the disk spinning in the drive? If your machine has two CD drives did you put the disk in the master drive?

[hobbiest24]

I think the bios may have been damaged by one of the viruses

[JJ 3000]

Have you tried flashing your BIOS?

[hobbiest24]

no not yet,    im still fasinated with how i have the 2 hdd both booting the 1 system, and surprised at how fast it runs.  still dont know how its running the way it is.

[JJ 3000]

Well if it aint broke dont fix it. If you dont need both of thos computers running then I wouldnt worry about it. Also, you have another one now for spare parts 

[hobbiest24]

Its only 667mhz  with 128 pc100 sdram,  and it runs as fast as my amd 4300x2 with 512mb ddr2,
figure that one out?

[Dias de verano]

Its only 667mhz  with 128 pc100 sdram,  and it runs as fast as my amd 4300x2 with 512mb ddr2,
figure that one out?

Maybe you won't see much of a difference with just opening and shutting windows, drawing screen furniture, etc, but I am absolutely sure that if you compare some CPU/memory intensive tasks you will see a difference.

For example Prime95.

http://www.mersenne.org/freesoft.htm