OKAY here is my crazy story...
I took the HP a 6040n pc from my bro, it came with VISTA... but I wanted to install XP. Of course the HP came with SATA HD and XP installer doesn’t come with SATA drivers. after few hours of search I found out that asus and HP made a deal not to publish the drivers for the “awesome” P5LP-LE mother board but after an extensive search I found other people like me and found many posts for the drivers... so I went and got me a floppy drive downloaded it pressed F6 did the whole shabam but it recognized the HD as only 135 GB and it actually is 320 GB.. I thought no biggie after I install everything I’ll update whatever... after the installation was done the PC went in a loop, it would start then after the hp logo it would just restart again over and over.... I found a thread about using Nlite to imbed the SATA drivers in the installation CD. I tried it and after I burnt the ISO it still saw only saw 132 GB and afterwards it still went in that loop. I tried everything, setting the BIOS to IDE, RAID and ACHI nothing worked the pc just wont want to get out of that loop... BUT the main reason I’m typing all this is because all of a sudden the CD ROM won’t boot! Not with any bootable XP, FDISK, UTILITY CD's... NOTHING the ROM is right there in the bios the tray opens and closes but it won’t even try to read any CD, they just sit there... SO my question is... what can I do now? I lost the hidden partition that held the VISTA source because I partitioned it, and I formatted it afterwards, I can’t get XP to see the damn SATA and now my CD ROM failed and I don’t even know why, could the loop have damaged the mother board? Do I need to replace the CD ROM or the HARD DRIVE? Plz don’t tell me to throw it away... any help is greatly appreciated

Support Information:
Device Type: BIOS / Motherboard
Manufacturer: ASUS
Model: P5LP-LE
Interface: IDE
Operating System: Windows XP Professional
Age of Device: < 1 year old
FCCID:

Find it on DriverGuide (http://members.driverguide.com/index.php?action=srch&sm=b&aax=&qa6=122&qa5=1&qa7=1500&dp=1&qm0=P5LP-LE&jmd=and&fzz=d) | Find it with Google (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=ASUS+BIOS+%2F+Motherboard++P5LP-LE+Windows+XP+Professional+) | Research manufacturer ASUS (http://members.driverguide.com/index.php?action=getinfo&companyid=122)

I would not replace either until I knew for sure if one is defective. Make sure you have the bios settings where the optical drive is the FIRST boot device. Then boot the machine with a bootable disk like a Windows XP install disk. If it fails to boot, try another bootable disk. If it still fails, I'd open the machine and check the cables as they can often become dislodged. If it still won't boot, I'd suggest a new optical drive.

Also, check the HP website driver page for this model and see if a BIOS update is available (version 5.23 is posted in the Vista download page). If so and it's NEWER than your present bios, by all means, update the bios then test again.

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/softwareCategory?lc=en&dlc=en&cc=us&product=3377278&lang=en&

You can also visit their talk forum and usually get great help there.