WIN 2000 "No Bootable Drive Error" on new K7N2 Delta

Question

Installed new MSI K7N2 MB and AMD Athlon XP 2500+ chip on Saturday and get to WIN 2000 boot and then blue screen error "can not find bootable drive?".
My friend tried booting from his and my WIN 2000 CD to no avail. Both drives show up on startup. Checked cables and tried swopping to no avail.
Any help would be apprreciated. I have tried the stickies to no avail.
Set up:
Maxtor 20 g master (OS System installed)
Maxtor 80 g slave for video editing
HP CD RW
NEC DVD RW
AGP display Video Card
IEEE firewire PCI
FDD
AMD Athlon 2500+ XP (333 FSB)
MSI K7N2 Delta MB
Antec 300 w mini-tower case ( bought off shelf at store) (do not have the specs on AMPS as I am at work)
Could it be the PSU?
I know Wonk or someone can offer me their guidance please. The Mrs. is PO'd.

Answer 1

I got that same error today, when I was trying to add a new boot drive with fresh W2K.  I'm going to rant for a while, but you can skip it if you're not using an external drive and you've tested your internal drive ATA (round or ribbon) cables. (note that they can be v-e-r-y bad even if they look OK).   I'll explain how these things relate to "No boot drive", but you'll have to bear with me, I'm still venting and trying to get over how stinking aggravating, time-consuming, AND expensive these components can be and still the manufacturers won't take responsibility for problems.  Sony orphaned this one while it was still on the shelves at office supply stores.  
Anyway, I'm such a fool --I know real well that my SONY CRX2100U USB external CDRW is a pig, but I always forget about that because it works pretty well with my MSI board and W2K *once everything is installed*.  But it dies suddenly if I run the W2K setup from it (seems liek the USB20 driver gets stepped on or something.  With other machines, like a Toshiba laptop, I have to disconnect it to boot at all.  It gets in the way of the boot, somehow.  it seems to have some issues with USB 2.0 compliance.  So if you're working off an external hard drive, you might want to consider that it can be less than well-behaved at boot time.
What's this got to do with "no bootable drive"?  I don't know, really.  JUst that Win2K setup blows its brains out and suddenly stops knowing about the USB 2.0 drive, and a Toshiba laptop can't boot with a Sony USB 2.0 drive connected to it.  
One other problem it might be:  The ATA cable MSI puts in the motherboard boxes is either a good one or a really awful one.  The awful ones are truly awful--I suspect that they attract and amplify electromagnetic radiation from sun spots or something...something makes the system go NUTS reporting disk errors and such.  My K7N2 Delta ILSR came with the red plastic round cable, it is good as gold.  My K7N2 Delta-L came with a wire-mesh wrapped 80-conductor cable, and I never saw anything more evil than it was, when brand new on a new system.  It *looked* fine, good as new, but acted like it was shorting out the drives.  Fuh, as much as I like to get free cables, I'll never use that one again.  I dug up a twisted old ATA 80 c0nductor (blue-terminated) cable out of an old box and put it in, in place of the wire-mesh round cable, and the system came back to life immediately.
You pro'lly otter get a known good-quality 80 conductor cable for the internal drives.  
So hope this helps.