Hi I am having a rather annoying problem with my PC recently.

I booted into windows, got the BSOD. Rebooted and now in the first BIOS screen (where it shows the CPU clock speed), it detects the DVDRW but then seems to skip over detecting the HDs and just goes onto the nVidia Boot Agent and stops there.

I have tried resetting the CMOS and flashing the BIOS but neither have produced different results. When I go into Standard CMOS options in the BIOS menu the HDs do not appear there either (I have 2 SATAs) and it can't autodetect them.

If I boot into Ubuntu using the live CD however, I can still see the HDs and all my partitions so I am presuming this is a motherboard problem, I just have no idea how to go about solving it!

I took it to a local computer shop but the guy in the computer shop wasn't sure what was wrong with it.

I have tried formatting the HD and installing Ubuntu on it, but again when rebooted the BIOS fails to detect any HD and just goes to the nVidia Boot Agent.

When I try to reinstall Windows XP Pro, if I use the SATA drivers then it says Windows cannot detect any drives available for install. If I don't load the SATA drivers then I did a full NTFS format of the drive; when it rebooted to install Windows again it doesn't detect the hard drives and just skips over them.

I have checked the HDs in another computer and they work (the second one still has all the data on it). So at present what is happening is:

- Turn on computer
- HDs aren't detected in the BIOS
- Motherboard nVidia Boot agent loads (as no HDs are detected)
- Can install an OS onto the HD fine but still isn't detected in the BIOS at startup


I'm thinking the motherboard might just be knackered, but I don't want to go and replace the MB, CPU and RAM without checking if there could be the possibility of fixing it.

Thanks for any help.

Forgot to post my specs:

K8NF-9 Rev. 1 nForce 4 Motherboard
450W Tagan Whisper PSU
AMD Athlon 64 3500+Venice
2GB (4x512MB) Corsair Value Select DDR 3200 RAM
MSI GeForce 8600 GT OC GPU
DVD-RW
160GB Hitachi Deskstar HD
250 GB Samsung Spinpoint HD

If you have fully formatted the drives and put them in another machine and you can load an OS on them then the drives are good.Your memeory could also have problems, i have seen bad memory do stuff like that.Finally the sata controller on your board might be bad, you could get a cheap sata card and test it if you wish.

How could I go about testing/replacing the sata card on the motherboard?
Thanks

mobo battery maybe

I have tried taking out the battery and also flashing the BIOS and clearing the CMOS but neither have changed anything.