Doesn't affect the bios routine, or the bios setup.

Fdisk has to "see" the hard drive first.

Run Fdisk and see if you can View the information.  If they do not show up
here, then open the box and check the drive cable, power cables, etc.

The BIOS recognizing the drive is at the lowest level and should not be
affected by software installed on the system.  Fdisk is very basic as well.
If the drive is recognized by the BIOS, then Fdisk should see it as well.
If neither of these see the drives, then the problem is most likely
hardware.  While it's possible that both drives failed simultaneously, it's
unlikely unless you had a power surge or something similar so I'd look for
other causes.

What changes, if any, were made to the system just before this happened?
That might give you a clue.

PattyL

This could be a major hardware failure or a minor one.
So repost your question supplying details.
1.  Will this PC boot DOS from a floppy?
2.  At what date did this PC last boot OK from the
hard drive?
2b.  What changes have been made since that date?

As others have said, it's a hardware problem. Assuming you haven't
disturbed any cables, and if both hard drives are on the same cable,
then the master drive is probably at fault. Disconnect the slave drive
from the ribbon cable and check whether BIOS is now able to autodetect
the HD. Do the same for the slave after disconnecting the master. You
may or may not need to re-jumper the slave as the master for this
test.

Only if the drive is visible to DOS/Windows, and then only if it has
been partitioned by a third party boot manager. Even then you could
restore the MBR code by re-running the third party app. Note that the
/MBR switch only affects the code in the MBR, not the partition table,
so your data should remain intact.

-- Franc Zabkar

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