Hard drive not recognized

Hey guys, I have a problem; I'm repairing a gateway emachines T6420 with xp, media center pc. When it tries to boot it comes up with disk boot failure, insert boot disk (no change after inserting disk)! I went into bios and of course it's not recognizing any drives, not even the cd/dvd. I replaced the hard drive and cd; the connections are good. Is ther anything I can check other than what I've already done; any suggestions at all!! Please help! Is there a setting in bios I should be looking at? Any help would be deeply appreciated

 

Are these pata or sata drives? are they enabled in bios?

 

IDE, not sure what a pata is but it's not sata

 

in bios it says NONE next to master, slave along with secondary (NONE)

 

yes, they are enabled in bios.

 

Pata, ata, ide all the same.
Is the hard drive and the cdrom on the same ribbon?
Are they jumperd correctly?
Depending on how new the board is there might be an option to enable pata.
Also try changing the ribbon

 

they're jumped correctly, I changed the ribbon, but the HD has a seperate ribbon and the board is about 3 years old, I'll look to see if there is a setting for pata. thanks

 

If bios is not recognising the drives then I suspect there is a problem with the onboard pata controllers.
The only way to test is to see if the drives are ok by try them in another machine, then you will know if it is the motherboard at fault.

 

thanks

 

Thanks for your help bigbear! I actually have two emachines I'm repairing with similar problems; so I took a hard drive out of one, replaced the power supply on the other, put a graphics card in the same one and I at least have one accepting the OS installation. Not bad considering I could get neither to boot at all