Well, here's the update. Brandon says when he originally had his computer with the single drive, he had no jumper settings on it, as there was no other drive running. Forgetting about that, he installed the new hd with slave jumper settings, while the orginal was not on master. Now, he can force the the old drive to be read as master by forcing the jumper setting to be master, but even when he only has the single hard drive in, without the jumper it's reading it as slave, when it should in fact be defaulting it to master. It seems some sort of confusion happened when he installed that slave drive, but he has no idea what it is or how to fix it.

He's also going to try working with it by reinstalling the old video card to see if it helps.

If that should fail, he's going to go to bed for the night, so please leave any ideas or comments in LJ. We both appreciate your help and love. Ever so grateful for good friends and advice.

UPDATE: The computer keeps trying to boot from CD, which it shouldn't be, apparently. That's what seems to be failing, and he doesn't know why, as he doesn't have that set up in the bios. Old video card was no help, it seems.

Thanks again, and if anyone has any clue, drop us a line.