Gavia

Another update:

I feel that I've now screwed my hard drive over royally. I went into the Vista repair options and through bootsect put the boot handler to ntldr. I then tried to install XP again to a new partition but now when i turn on the computer I can't even get past the BIOS. It gets to the point where it detects the HDDs. It detects both my HDDs, says the status is OK and then just sits there. You can't get into setup or anything. Suspecting that the problem was the HDD, I removed it and put in an old 20GB one I had, installed XP on it and it ran smoothly. I then set the old hard drive as a slave and the same problem appeared. The BIOS would just sit after it said it detected both HDDs and they were OK.

If it helps, my motherboard is an Asus P4P800, the bios is American Megatrend v2.51, I'm using 1.5gb of RAM and I have two identical 160GB Western Digital hard drives. One hard drive works and still has it's files on it (tested it as a slave with the 20gb hdd) but the other HDD just doesn't do squat.

Any and all help is welcome.

PS. I forgot to mention that when I originally tried to install XP, I didn't actually create the partition, i just hit enter on 17gb of unpartitioned space, and then when I tried to install XP again just before, I tried to create a partition on that 17GB and nothing would happen. It would just appear as plain 17GB of unpartitioned space. I ended up creating a 5gb partition after the primary partition which is where i ended with the BIOS just hanging.