For some reason, every time I boot my computer, it attempts to boot from the CD. I've gone into the BIOS and checked that Boot from HD was #1, but it keeps happening. I thought maybe it was an old school autoexec.bat thing, but that file was empty. Any ideas?

Even though it attempts to boot from cd, if there is no bootable cd, it should skip it and go to the next device. Is this not happening?

Are you still booting to Windows? Or does it stop at the booting from CD?

If there is no bootable CD in the CD drive, it stops, says there is a error booting from the CD, and prompts me to do to press enter. It then proceeds to boot from the hard drive to XP. If there is a bootable CD, it boots from the CD (I tested this with the XP install disk). I have tried totally eliminating the CD from the boot sequence in my BIOS, but it still tries to boot from the CD. Other than the BIOS, what tells XP to boot from the CD drive?

XP doesn't take over until the bios lets it, so its not an XP issue.

Open up the PC and unplug the cd drive power and ide cable.

Does that boot straight from the hard drive?

If it doesn't then the hard drive's boot partition may not be set as active.

Try it and post back.

Alrighty, disconnected power and ide cable on both CDs and the floppy too just for good measure, but I still get the message "Boot Disk Failure, insert system disk and press enter". Pressing enter (without doing anything else) boots to XP. How do I tell if my hard drive's boot partition is set as active?

Okay, I figured out the problem but not the solution. The problem is an external hard drive that the computer is trying to boot from. When I disconnect the external hard drive, the problem goes away. I can't figure out why the BIOS thinks this new USB drive is the primary drive.

Got it fixed. Once I reconnected the drive I was able to locate the area in my BIOS and change the primary boot drive. Thanks or your help.