typical Wiring/jumper locations

I posted this in the "Internal Hardware" forum a week or so ago and got no replies so, I thought I would try here ...

Hello fellow members. Been a while since I have visited or posted here but, here is my issue ... Before we got this computer, I had an HP Pavilion 520w. It is at least 10 years old. XP Home, SP3. If someone needs other specs, I will try to provide them. It has the typical setup of A: being 1.44 Floppy, a CD ROM and a CD burner, with a couple ver. 1 USB ports.
My question/request here is this ... Years back, when we got this one, we gave THAT one to my step-son to use ... now he lives elsewhere, the 'puter is still here, barely running. I want to reinstall the OS and start over but, it don't boot to the CD. After he moved, I took it outside and opened it up to blow all the dust out of it. It was at that time I became concerned with the jumper settings on the CD drives. They are both set as "Master". I am asking here, if someone who puts them together frequently could put together some kind of schematic or diagram of the order they should be in along with the jumper settings. I have no clue if the kid has been in there!
A couple other bits of info, the burner will open but, has a Red light on. The CD ROM flickers green during Boot but, does not open. The HD light is constantly on and recently it freezes during the boot process. I tried booting in "safe mode" but it freezes there too. I got it to boot up yesterday but, it freezes up ... the cursor will stop for periods of time and then move again.
Maybe it's toasted and ready for the great electronics pile in the sky ... lol

Hi Rich, it's been a while since I've messed with the older computers but I'll give it a whirl. Are both CD's on the same cable? If so, they should be on different cables, you should have 2 ribbon cables. Anyway, I would unplug one of the CD's (the power) so your board can only see one when you go into the BIOS and set it for boot to CD. Hopefully it won't be confused that way..
Or, you could hook the old drive to your new computer, if you have the right cable, and format it from there and reinstall XP to it.
Does this make sense??

Hello,

I agree with wildabeast. Based on your description the burner has a problem. I would just disconnect that one and try booting again.

Both drives can be on the same cable. One should be set as the master and the other as the slave. That being said with the age of the computer one or both of the cd drives may be dying. In addition ten years is a long time for a hard drive as well. If you can get one if the cd drives to work right then yiu need to set the computer to boot from the cd drive first. Access the BIOS by hitting the key shown when it starts. It may call it setup it is the same thing. What you are looking for is the boot order setting. Usually it is under the advanced settings. Change the setting so the cd is the first boot device. Save and exit. Put the os disk in and when the computer starts it should niw give you the option to boot from the cd by pressing any key.