PC not recognizing drives

Hey, I have a pretty bad problem on my hands.

My friend game me his sister's computer to fix, and I'm stumped. The BIOS posts, but doesn't recognize that any drives (HDD and optical) are connected. As a result, all that I see is a message saying "operating system not found". I tested the HDD on my PC and it worked fine. I tried booting an XP install cd and a BART PE CD, but none of them would boot (because the peripherals weren't detected). The only thing I can think of is that the IDE controller is fried. Any other thoughts?

Check the bios and make sure they aren't simply disabled.
Check the cables too.

If everything seems like it should be ok, I suspect your diagnosis is right.

Yeah possibly the controller is bad if everything else checks out...

yeah, all peripherals enabled and checked cables like 5 time. Guess It's a new Mobo :(. Thanks for the help, unless anyone else has any ideas.

If you have another DVD drive try that also, bust sounds like the controller to me as well

This is such a long shot its hardly worth mentioning. But I have seen this before. A screw comes loose or is removed to put in a pci card and misplaced then a new one is used and the other goes unnoticed. Someone picks up the box and moves it to another location and in the process the box gets turned around and the screw ends up lodged behind the mobo. It may or maynot short anything out immediatedly but when it does, all hell breaks loose. To test for it, all you have to do is loosen all the mounting screws, about three or four turns, and rap the back of the box behind the motherboard and listen for the tell tale tinkle. Hopefully if you hear it, and its not one of the screws you just loosened you found one of the most difficult to diagnose problems a PC can have.

i think once you have to check jumper settings when you connect both your hard drive & DVD drive & few BIOS support only hard drive as primary master, so try to check jumper settings

nm.

I have already looked at the jumpers and they were set to cable select. I tried changing them to specify master/slave, but didn't help (this is old hardware).

@ Appazalien, no screws, but thanks for trying :(

I told my friend that it's fried, so he'll have to decide what to do from there.

You might want to get a PCI IDE controller which will solve your problem in a cheap manner...

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Originally Posted by sagib

You might want to get a PCI IDE controller which will solve your problem in a cheap manner...

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Considering that it has a 1GHz processor and 256MB of ram, I don't think it's wise to invest in an IDE controller. Thanks for the suggestion though.

what is the model of motherboard and what size of HDD do you try to use ?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by KiNdZiUs

what is the model of motherboard and what size of HDD do you try to use ?

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It's not compatibility, the drives were stock and worked in the past with the mobo.

As Detale suggested I'd try a different cd/dvd drive....and if you had a spare HD just to be sure too.

You could also take out the cmos battery and leave it out for a few hours, pref over night and that should reset the bios.

Make sure the jumper settings are set correctly..... I'd certainly try a cd/dvd drive though for sure.

Good luck