primary drive fail

I just installed an asus A7V motherboard and and a amd ghz processor. I reformatted my harddrive to get a clean install and everything. When I boot up it starts its detection processes and the harddrive is detected when its searchin, the name comes up, but after it finishes all its detecting it says primary drive fails and says f1 to continue and del to enter setup. Ive tried just pluggin the harddrive in alone without the cd and ive tried pluggin it into the ata slots but no matter where i put it primary drive fail comes up. If i continue its like the drive isn't there it says bios can't be installed because there is no drive and obviously if i try to load my cd driver from a boot disk that doesn't work cause the drive isn't working.. What could this be? I put my old board back in and it worked fine. installed the drivers and reinstalled windows without a problem. So i don't think its a connection and ive spent hours just checking and double checking everything. I used the new cables that came with the motherboard too. If anyone could help i would really appreciate it!