PC not recognizing drives

[mbucari1]

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?

[lynx]

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.

[DasFox]

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

[mbucari1]

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.

[Detale]

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

[Appzalien]

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.

[octshik]

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

[zapjb]

nm.

[mbucari1]

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.

[tutipute]

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