Have you looked in your BIOS to see what the boot order is set for?
You need to have hard drive "0" set as first in some mother boards,
or they get confused...
It sounds like yours is set to boot from CD first, and the CD is reverting
you to the HD after a "time-out" that is in the bootloader on the CD.

                                                Rick Glazier

From: "Malcolm Smith"
Subject: Re: xp boots from cd-rom
> A while back I tried out a windows XP startup disk from my cd-rom and now I have to my copy of Windows XP pro in the cd-rom to 
> boot. I didn't used to have to boot this way. I've tried using the F8 key, but no luck. Anyone have an idea what I should do next? 



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