Bios Auto Detect

i need advice/help so here it is.

my aunt's hard drive won't reboot to a fresh copy of xp home. i tried it at her home, when i restart and f12 boot to cd. nothing. says auto detect failure, doesnt reboot, then formated the hard drive [western digital] and i tried another IDE cable and nothing. same problem. i use to format and installs smoothly now it gives me this problem. in bios i set the settings to auto detect and both my cd/dvd drives are plugged in an detected

and now i tried to reboot my aunts and my hard drive on my pc. and now it gives me the auto detect failure when i boot up with the cd. but xp home turns on as usual. it worked before i switched my hard drive and 1st ide cable. switched back to the 1st ide cable won't turn on, switched to the 2nd ide cable and it works. but not my aunts hd.

so how do i fix the auto detect failure. so that i could reboot her hard drive.

Roughly how old is the system?

First check the jumper settings (those plastic bits (jumpers) that side onto two pins) and make sure the drive at the end of the cable is set to Master, and the second drive on the cable is set to Slave.

This site list a bunch of other things to look for:

http://www.pcguide.com/ts/x/comp/hdd/failSetupDetect-c.html

http://www.pcguide.com/ts/x/ggen01.htm