New DIY PC don't feel like booting

[hopey]

Ugh. This is my first foray into assembling a PC myself since the DOS days... and I seem to have hit a wall.
On bootup, everything looks fine except for a message saying that my 80 pin cable is missing. It's not. This didn't stop the XP install process, which went fine, but upon a reboot, it hangs up while posting and says "booting from CD..." and there it stays. I had BIOS set to boot from HD, then floppy, then CD, and I changed it to go HD,CD,floppy, but no change. Any ideas, folks? any further background info needed for advice?
Thanks in advance for any guidance...

 

[Mem]

Q: When I boot the system I receive this message: Primary Ide channel no 80 conductor cable installed. Is there a fix for this message?

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Is it on right way round?.....Also try replacing the cable since it may be defective,see below.

Boot Up
A: You may have either a defective 80 pin cable, or not using 80 pin cable on an ATA/66 drive and with BIOS set the drive to recognize ATA/66. If you are not using an ATA/66 drive, disable ATA/66 support in the BIOS setup, otherwise replace the cable to an 80 pin cable.

Btw hopey, welcome to AT forums.

 

[mechBgon]

Welcome to the Forums hopey Can you list out your full specs, including the brand/model of your hard drive and so forth?

 

[hopey]

I have an EPoX EP -8RDA3+ motherboard with an Athlon 2500+ processor, 512 MB, toshiba 16x DVD readerm western digital 120G, 7200 rpm 8 meg cache, and a gainward video card of some sort I got because the Radeon card I got was DOA. I also have an echo digital MIA soundcard.
hope that helps- and thanks for the warm welcome!

 

[mechBgon]

Ok, open up the case and pull the jumper off the Western Digital's jumper pins. This sets it to Single Drive mode. Western Digitals are fussy about this

Also, confirm that the colored plug (usually blue) of your IDE cable is plugged into the motherboard. I'd put the hard drive at the opposite end to reduce signal bounce, although I don't think it's really a big deal one way or the other.

Hope that's a help

By the way, if you don't have a hardware firewall (a home cable/DSL router like the popular Linksys and Netgear ones), you may want to check out this page I made about keeping your newly-built Windows system from catching worms behind your back: link to page Average time to infection for an unprotected system is currently about 20 minutes, but can happen in ten seconds if you're unlucky.

 

[hopey]

OK, now that I've had sufficient time to follow up on your suggestions, I'm still in the same spot. I pulled off the jumper to no avail. upon close inspection of the IDE cable, it was indeed backwards. The problem is, given the configuration of the case, that's the only way it's going to fit at all. Guess I'll have to go get another one. BIOS has no settings for ATA/66 either way. Is the backwards cable a problem enough to cause the hangup?