[QUOTE]Right, I just did the BIOS and set it to the fail-safe defaults and then saved + excited from that.[/QUOTE]

Does the computer still boot withour pressing [F8] ?

What is the boot sequence in BIOS?

What info about the disks does it give in BIOS?

Ok, when I posted my last reply I turned it off after I replied.

Now I just turned it back on and it crashed on my motherboard splash screen, which is normally the first thing I see before BIOS kicks in.

So I turned it off and turned it back on - to which I got nothing on the screen and my graphica card fan stayed at 100% speed - nothing more than that.

Aaargh - please help! :(

Remove the mains power cable from computer. Wait for a minute for the power to go from the syetem. Plug the power cable back in and boot...

Ok, tried that and it re-booted ok. But it still hands at the NTLDR error message, which is the last part of the BIOS/POST part, just after Verifying DMI Settings. :(

NTLDR is a Windoze thing.

What is the boot sequence (order) in BIOS? And what info does the BIOS give about the disks.

Make sure all cable inside the computer are fitted snugly.

From what I've read, your motherboard is set to "optimised" from the factory assuming you have qualified hardware-- you could try settnig the BIOS to "optimised" + save and seeing if it boots okay.

After that we can try a few other things to get Windoze to boot...

This is one hell of a weird problem.

I checked the BIOS settings as suggested and after you previously said to set the fail-safe settings, it totally screwed up the BIOS. The drives were being read in the wrong order, so I pulled the data cable out of my secondary drive which was now being read as the boot master and it booted happily into Windows.

Now where to go from here? Thanks in advance ;) (phew)

Plug the second drive back in and see if you can change the boot sequence (order)... maybe boot sata first?

You have one sata and one ide, okay? Is the sata the master/primary boot disk?

Correct - I have one SATA which is my Windows drive and one IDE drive with just files on. So I change the boot settings in BIOS and see if they get on together?

Yes. With both plugged in, see if you can get the SATA to boot first.

check in BIOS that both SATA and IDE are enabled

In the BIOS settings, the boot priority is set to Hard Drive, but there is no differentiation between SATA or IDE. So I left it as that and saved and excited, rebooted and it worked somehow.

Even though when the devices are listed they are in the wrong order but it still picks up that I want to boot into the SATA one. So Windows is back to normal, as it were on that machine for now. Maybe it's got something to do with the jumper settings on the IDE drive maybe?

But it works and reads the drives in the right order within Windows!

Back to the real problem - shall I try safe mode this time?

yes, now try safe mode again...