Only have one DVD and one HD in there.
It does not matter about whether they are master / slave or whatever.
The only thing is that they have the ability to boot from it... Not all sata ports will allow you to boot you see.
Make sure the BIOS is set to boot from the CD then the HD
When drives are starting to play up, they can often lose the ability to boot and yet still have fully functioning access to the entire disk? - how old is the Drive?
The flashing cursor can be that its not even trying to access the disk or that it is, but its been left hanging by bad reading, or perhaps the HD has partial data and is causing the computer to hang.
Have you tried booting from a DOS floppy, and then using FDISK to kill off the parttition data?
will another PC boot up with that DVD?
Since oyu do have access to anothger PC, try using the DVD Drive out of the good PC, just to get the naughty one to boot?
It does not matter about whether they are master / slave or whatever.
The only thing is that they have the ability to boot from it... Not all sata ports will allow you to boot you see.
Make sure the BIOS is set to boot from the CD then the HD
When drives are starting to play up, they can often lose the ability to boot and yet still have fully functioning access to the entire disk? - how old is the Drive?
The flashing cursor can be that its not even trying to access the disk or that it is, but its been left hanging by bad reading, or perhaps the HD has partial data and is causing the computer to hang.
Have you tried booting from a DOS floppy, and then using FDISK to kill off the parttition data?
will another PC boot up with that DVD?
Since oyu do have access to anothger PC, try using the DVD Drive out of the good PC, just to get the naughty one to boot?