HP Compaq D500 Startup Problem

[#1]

The CD I used was a copy of my "XP with SP2" - a genuine and legal disk - with SP3 slipstreamed on it.
My pc doesn't come up with any messages about the hard disk, except the BIOS states make and model and identifies the disk with XP on is  IDE Primary 0, and the other hard disk on the same ribbon cable is IDE Primary 1. The links are set up for Master (XP disk) and Slave (other disk), and I have tried swapping the cable connections so the XP disk is at the end of the cable or in the middle (no difference either way).
When the pc boots it does keep complaining about the date and time, and says I may have to change the battery. Otherwise as it finishes POST, it displays the following:-
Network Server Mode Active
Attempting to Boot from Hard Drive C:
It then justs sits there doing nothing so I CNTRL/ALT/DEL and this time it comes out of POST with:-
Attempting to Boot from Floppy Drive A:
Attempting to Boot from CD-ROM
Attempting to Boot from Hard Drive C:
Again it just sits there - no messages
Any clues in that lot?

[#2]

That suggests it cant see the drive and is hunting for it. Get rid of the second drive for testing and see what happens try removing the cd if that doesnt work and put the drive on that controller.
If it see the drive it should say no boot device, none system disk or similar if it sees the drive and cant boot

[#3]

Perhaps no drive is marked "active" ie, as bootable?

[#4]

The drive should be active as it came out of another working pc but you have I think identified the problem. Remove the second drive if you have to drives set as active  lot of bios cant cope as it doesnt know which to boot from which is why its hanging

[#5]

I removed the second drive - no change. I removed the CD Drive, and moved the C:drive over to the Secondary IDE connector on nthe motherboard - no change. I have gone into the BIOS and reset to Defaults - no change except I no longer get those "Attempting to Boot" messages - I still get the complaint about the Date & Time Stamp, and I still get "F1:Boot".

[#6]

Since you have a diskette drive 
Why not download DOS  (DR-DOS is free to download)
You could at least boot the damn thing and see if your hard disk is visible.
You might have to go to a museum to find a diskette though. 
I think if DOS won't run, then it's probably headed for the nearest skip.

[#7]

Unfortunately, that hasn't worked either, so you may be right about the scrap heap.
I'm going to try one more thing - a complete re-install as suggested a few days ago by MuppetGrinder. I'll let you know how that gets on, but don't hold your breath cos I cant do it until tomorrow evening.
Cheers

[#8]

Right done a full install using my "XP with SP3 slipstreamed on it. Result - every time the installation got to where it had to reboot it would only reboot from the CD, so it tried to restart the install, and I didn't get anywhere.
I moved the hard disk back to the pc it had come from, and had to do a full install (not a repair) on that. Used the XP with SP3 CD and same result - every time install got to reboot, it would only reboot from the CD and tried to restart the install.
I went back to using my original XP CD (with SP2). I managed to do a full installation without problem.
Moved the hard disk back to the Compaq, and tried a full install from the original XP CD. Now when the PC rebots it says:-
NTLDR is missing
Press any key to restart
I tried repairing from the System Restore (using the original XP CD). I did the following:-
FIXMBR C:
FIXBOOT C:
COPY D:\I386\NTLDR C:\
COPY D:\I386\NTDETECT.COM C:\
BOOTCFG /REBUILD
Both COPY commands said did I want to overwrite NTLDR or NTDETECT.COM, so I assume they were there after all.
Also I expected to have to enter Load Identity, and also enter OS Load Options, but I didn't get either of those.
Could there be something on the motherboard that sets a hard drive to Read-only? Although that doesn't explain by bootup says NTLDR Is missing while trying to write a new copy of NTLDR to the hard drive requires my agreement.

[#9]

If there is a AV in the bios it would stop you writing to the disk it may be called boot sector protect or similar it need turning off. You say with SP3 it would only boot from the cd you should have tried removing the cd between reboots. I wonder how you slip streamed as there is an option to boot from the cd with out the message press any key, if that was set and the cd was in the drive it would go round in circles. NTLDR is missing normally means there is a fault with the disk as its normally there run chkdsk c: /f to see if there is any errors

[#10]

I used the XP with SP2 CD to bootup and run System Restore, then I tried to run chkdsk c: /f, but it didn't like the /f. I ran a full chkdsk c: /p and that came back okay. I ran chkdsk c: /r and that came back okay.
I ran dir c:\ and found CONFIG.SYS, AUTOEXEC.BAT, IO.SYS, and MSDOS.SYS. The size of them were all 0, and their characteristics were "a" for the first two and "ahrs" for the other two. Does that give any clues?
As for removing the CD between reboots, when I was moving a hard disk from one pc to another (see my thread about the GX270 2 or 3 weeks ago), I didn't take the CD out cos when I d, the installation process complained.
Now I cannot get into the section of installation where I can select Repair (when you can select System Restore but you use the Enter button instead, it would go to a later selection where you chose between a new install or repairing the old), so I am forced into a new installation. That allows me to remove the disk when it goes back to reboot, but I still get the NTLDR missing message again.
I haven't had time to look for the AV in the BIOS, but I will do that later
Regards Will be in touch with an update

[#11]

Right fellas. I've given up on this problem. The BIOS doesn't seem to have anything that prevents writing to the hard disk. It still claims it cant find NTLDR when I boot up, but if I use the Win XP CD to boot up , and go into Restore, I can see the file.
This pc is for the scrap heap.
Thanks to everyone for their help. I've put the hard drive back not to the pc it vcame out of, but back into the GX200 I was using  a while back. I've done this so I can use a second hard disk (as a second drive) which has a lot of data on it. As you can see if you look at a thread I started yesterday or the day before, this second drive was causing problems during POST.
Thanks to all for your help. I guess this one is so strange it was always goig to be difficult to solve.
Regards