Mobo doesn't want to boot hdd without optical drive...

[Nowhere]

Weird thing...I can't remove DVD-ROM from the computer, because the HDD won't boot in such case ("boot disk failure, insert another and press enter" or something like that). At first I thought it's because the option for booting from CDROM was ON, but that proved not to be the case...I don't know what to do, other than getting some old, crappy drive, even broken, but recognised by bios.

The mobo is Asus p2l97-ds
HDD is old ~500mb Seagate.

[rylan]

Was it on the same IDE chain and the HD set to something wierd like slave?
Some of the drives have to be jumpered to a 'neutral' setting if they are the only one, so setting it to Master by itself won't work.

[Nowhere]

Yep, got that already.
Apparently the drive wasn't satisfied with "master" setting, it wants setting "you're the only device on this channel, dammit"...
Wasn't very obvious to me...I gues I'm used to modern drives too much...

[Ali]

I had an Asus p2l97-ds years ago. One of the most stable motherboards I ever used. I do have to say I used the SCSI rather than IDE though.