BIOS problems after installation

[nspboarderdude]

I just attempted installing Mint on a machine that already has XP for dual boot purposes. Now something is wrong with BIOS. Upon startup I get "Media test failure, check cable" followed by "Non-system disk or disk error." I cannot boot to either Linux or Windows from hdd. I tried changing boot sequence and reseting BIOS to defaults. When I insert the Windows installation cd to try running chkdsk it hangs on "setup is inspecting your computer's hardware configuration" screen. I thought it might take awhile to inspect hardware, so I let it sit overnight and it was still hanging on that screen 6+ hours later. The only thing I can do is boot from Linux cd. Once in Linux I looked around at all the hdds and everything seems to be fine, which leads me to believe its a BIOS problem.

Also, if it means anything, Windows boots from C drive, which is SATA. I installed Mint on D drive, which is IDE, and was set to cable select. This whole thing is making my first Linux experience very unpleasant...someone please help.

[Husse]

I know quite a bit about computer hardware and one thing I know is not to use cable select unless you have to (this is the case in some Compaqs)
However I am not convinced that it is a BIOS problem as you can boot one CD but not another
I don't know how much you know about hardware, but I would open the box and change from CS to master. If something else is connected move it to the other IDE cable and take care that you don't have two masters on one cable (master at the end of the cable - slave in the middle)
Then I'd check that everything is connected as it should - I don't know how many times I've had something working only partially because something was not inserted as it should (mostly video card and IDE cables)

[nspboarderdude]

I switched the IDE to master, nothing. So removed the IDE drive completely; I suspect a faulty ribbon. I then installed Linux on another SATA hdd, different from the C drive. Still nothing. sudo blkid gives the following:

sda1 - ntfs (SATA, just media files on here)
sdb1 - ntfs (SATA, more media files)
sdb5 - ext3 (this is the SATA partition which has Mint)
sdb6 - swap
sdc1 - ntfs (SATA, this has XP)
sdd1 - ntfs (SATA, more media files)

Also, I changed the flags in GParted for sdc1 and sdb6 to boot, and now instead of the "check cable" error, I get "NTLDR is missing." help?

[nspboarderdude]

Well after a day of constant rebooting from the livecd, I've found that somehow during the installation process the boot.ini file was deleted from the C directory. what I ended up doing was disconnecting all the SATA hdds and installing to the IDE hdd. Now I can boot to Mint just fine, but not XP. All the files are there, so I didn't really lose anything, I just can't boot to Windows. So much for dual-booting, oh well, I'm off to discovering the world of Linux.