Very weird bootup problem

[Ace Pace]

Okay, first relevent specs, motherboard is an ASUS SLI deluxe latest bios revision motherboard, hooked up with a tweaked Win XP SP2 setup.

When boot order is HD first, I get a system boot error, and it refuses to boot, no matter what.

When I put CD then HD boot order, with the ASUS motherboard CD inside, it tries loading a..Floppy drive? then something it calls a Fat Kernel, after waiting for a second to realise I won't boot from the CD, it loads into Windows.

No other disc does this, without this disc it won't boot.

Has anyone ever heard of similer problems? Or solutions?

Again, when trying to tell the mobo to boot from HD, it dosn't boot.

[Edi]

Does the motherboard have any kind of unusual connection setups for the HD? Those can be a real fucking headache if they're present.

For example, my computer is old enough that UDMA-66 connections were new when I bought it and the UDMA-33 (the old standard IDE) was default. The two UDMA-66 connectors appear on my motherboard as an external device and Windows XP simply does not see them or any devices attached to them. At all. I've got another HD on those that runs Win98 (which has no problems with the EXT device in the boot order).

So look around the BIOS if you see unusual boot orders like C, A, EXT or similar and then a line where it says EXT=<define device here, usually SCSI or something else>.

If you can't get it working, take it back to the store and have it changed under warranty.

Edi