Hard Drive failure?

Sleeper Cell

Well, I haven't seriously posted on here for quite some time... But as of yesterday I'm having some odd issues with my PC that I built about 2 years ago! I had installed Windows XP on the computer when I built it, and it was running great. The computer ran very well until this year, when I moved into my apartment complex. It started getting slower and I noticed some viruses and crap that were just on the drive. I hadn't formatted the drive since I built it, so I figured it was time to give it some new life. During the time that I've owned the PC, I acquired x64 and figured that I'd give it a shot since I have a 64 bit processor.

The result... Well the computer ran quite fast on the new OS, but nothing worked! None of my drivers would install correctly and I said screw it, back to regular old XP... The problem was though that it wasn't booting off of the XP disk now. (and just to clarify, I have 3 hard disks running in the PC [2 IDE, 1 SATA])

So I thought maybe it was a boot priority error or something, and I changed the order in which the computer would boot (which hard drive). So now it booted off of one of my other hard drives. So after I was able to get onto one of my old hard drives, I booted off the disk again and formatted the SATA drive. Once it was done formatting, I installed XP on it and it went somewhat smooth. The computer booted into XP once without error, and I proceeded to install the sound drivers, video drivers, etc... When the PC rebooted, it gave me an error and would not load Windows. Also, what I noticed is that when it loaded XP onto the SATA hard drive, it did not label it as my C drive (which leads me to believe that it just booted off one of my other drives)...

The error read, "Boot disk error, install the boot disk and press enter." or something to that effect. The disk was in the drive, I pressed enter, and nothing happened... I don't understand what's going on? I've been fiddling with the BIOS settings to see if I can get anywhere but so far I've got no idea what's going on.

Is it a hardware error or am I just retarded?

Here are the specs for my PC by the way:
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ Toledo
ASUS A8N-SLI Premium 939 NVIDIA nForce4 SLI ATX
Seagate Barracuda 200GB
BFG 7600GTOC
3GB DDR memory (couple different brands)

That's just the general idea of what I'm working with...

Duke3d87

i think it has to do with the motherboard. I have the A8N32 SLI Deluxe and imo is kinda sucks.

When you plug in new devices and whatnot, it screws up the boot order of the motherboard and it tries to boot from a different device.

Normally if you change it back it works.

So i'd take out the other two and see if it boots properly.

Sleeper Cell

Alright I'll give it a shot and see if anything happens. Hopefully I can get this figured out!

And I totally remember you when I used to post on here a lot haha.