I have just built a new computer using AMD 2500XP+, leadtek nForce2 chipset, western digital 120gb HDD. When I restart my computer, sometimes it will boot and other times it will display the message "BOOT DISK FAILURE: Please insert system disk". It's not an old HDD so the head shouldn't be stuck and making the boot sequence longer for it to spin-up doesn't make a difference. It isn't a problem with just cold rebooting only. It seems to be basically random. Whats more it does this even if a bootable CD is in the CDROM.
A weird thing is I suspected it might be the CDROM(as this is old) so I unplugged that. Now I get an intermittent error saying ntodldr is missing or corrupt. I thought at first that this is just because the ording of the devices has changed and so the boot.ini was out of date, but sometimes it does boot into XP so it can't be that.
I've tried fixmbr, scanning for errors, repairing, reinstalling, swapping ide/eide cables, reseting the bios, flashing the bios, changing various bios settings including the boot order. No luck.
Other information that may be of use. The disk is formatted NTFS. The HDD is primary master on the on the eide, and CDROM was primary master on the secondary controller. The motherboard also has a SATA raid controller which I'm not using. The memory is 2x256mb generic which I've tested with memtest86. The power supply is new.
If I have to replace a bit or take it back I will but I'd like to be sure that is what the problem is first so any help would be appreciated.
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