Boot Sequence Problem

That's a strange one, but the first thing I would do is use a program like Acronis Disk Image and check if there are any extra partitions (on either drive) that might be interfering with the boot process.

Good luck.

The default search for a bootable drive is to check the drive that you have told your bios is the first in the boot sequence. If you have not told your bios what to consider the boot drive (first drive in its list of drives usually) then the default is to look for a boot sector on drive 0. Drive zero is usually the first drive on the master setting on IDE 1 (the first of two IDE controllers if you have 2). If the boot sector is not on that drive, and if you have a friendly bios, it will keep looking until it finds a bootable drive, and the first one it finds will boot. Older bios would just not boot under these circumstances until you either connected the drives as they expected or  told them where to look. Whatever you have told the bios, Windows will always name the drive that actually booted the system as C:.

You added a drive that is seen by your bios as being the first drive, and that drive is not bootable. The obvious solution is to do as your error report suggests, and find out how to tell your bios which is the first (boobable) drive and set your bootable drive as that drive. That would be a lot easier than physically connecting your boot drive to the proper IDE port and jumpered as master, but that would be another option.

If you had two drives on the same IDE channel both jumpered as master or both as slave, or with one jumpered as master or slave and the other as cable select and connected to the wrong plug on the cable so as to conflict with the jumpered drive, you would most likely find that one of the drives would not be recognized although on occasion you could get corruption of data. That is a bad situation, but is probably not your problem here.

     Hello again... Yes Slartabartfast suggested checking/changing your boot order in your BIOS... I agree... very easy to do... typical orders are floppy drive, CD/DVD drives. hard drive, hard drive. etc... But some bios will not let you chose the hard drives by MFG'r name... some will... that is why you use jumpers on IDE drives connected on 1 cable... to physically tell the bios which to look for first. In fact you could speed boot time by telling your bios not to look at the floppy drives or CD/DVD drives at start up...

     So yes enter your BIOS and see if your boot drive order shows the drive by MFG'r name, and not the generic "harddrive", and place in proper order... save and boot again...

     But as us Yanks sometime say... "Place all your Ducks in a Row"... I would place the jumper on the new drive to slave position... typically the second pin position to the right, jumper the top and bottom two pins vertically... they will come new, in master position or no jumper installed at all...

     As for my information or "misinformation" on the Windows format problem... typically hard drives come with a fat16/fat32 format, and now with your XP you can format to NTFS, and this is typical for Windows to suggest with a new harddrive... But if Windows thinks this is a master Boot Drive being formatted, ( due to both drives being seen as masters on that IDE Channel ), That Windows added information ( other than just formatting ) that made that drive Bootable... and now your Bios is seeing that Bootable information on the new Hard drive... Which it knows... is a different Hard drive than what is on it's Boot order list... But... electrically or thru firmware... The BIOS see's/looks at the new hard drive first... and it's a Bootable drive!!!... and thus the warning... and this is why, this problem started, after the Windows format, and rebooting the computer.

    You can use/format extra drives with or without boot information... and IDE drives use jumpers to force/tell the BIO's where to look first for Boot information.
   
    

So why did you not save the new BIOS settings and test?