Computer will post, but....

[jlefebre6001]

taking a look at a friend's computer and it will not boot from the hard drive or dvd drive. in fact when i go into the bios, it recognizes that there is a dvd drive but not the hard drive. i should also note that the hard drive is sata and the dvd drive is IDE. my friend says it was working fine then one morning he turned it on and windows wouldnt load. "system boot failure, insert system disk" i think is the message he gets. i havent messed around with it too much yet. going to try another HDD and a sata dvd drive, see what works and what doesnt. i have a feeling its the sata controller on the motherboard. i have a hard time believing its the hard drive since it was turned off then all of a sudden he had problems. what do you guys think? any input would be most helpful. **specs are athlon 64 3700, a8n-sli mobo, (2x512gb) corsair value select, 7800gtx, 500w PS, ide dvd drive, sata 120gb 7200 HDD, audigy 2 zs.

 

[hunter315]

Move the SATA cable to a different port on the motherboard, it might just be a bad port. Also throw the HDD into another machine and see if the BIOS there sees it, that will rule it out quickly as the problem if the BIOS on another machine sees it.