Primary Hard Drive Not Detected

hey, first off lett me tell you that my computer that i am running is very recent, my brother used it for programming and getting his professional certification in oricle. it worked perfectly and when he used it we didnt install a network card in there. but when he moved he gave me the computer and we got a network card for the computer for online gaming.. the computer began to lag so i ran msconfig to get rid of some of the start up programs, later that day i tried to turn on the computer again and it gave me a message saying "

"reboot or insert proper boot device.
or insert boot media and press any key "

we checked in the bios and the secondary hard drive is reconized but the primary one isnt...could it have possably been one of the start up processes that made it unable to reconize the primary?

any suggestions on what to do? my brothers work is still on the computer and so is my school work. we were running windows xp media edition

thanks, riggi

 

Unlikely, it does look like your HD has failed however, you could try going into the BIOS and looking for options such as "failsafe defaults" etc then rebooting.

If that doesn't work disconnect any other IDE devices (your second HD, DVD/CD drives etc) and try a reboot from that.

Failing that you could try booting from some diagnostic CD's (eg Hiren's) and check your HD from there (Though TBH if the BIOS doesn't recognize it I doubt that would help).

You mentioned you have two HD's, are master/slave jumpers set correctly or if using cable select have you inadvertently swapped the drives on the cable. or even swapped between primary/secondary controllers, Basically what if any recent changes to hardware have occurred?

BTW drive model numbers (for both drives would help).

 

Before you tear things apart or go any further, check your IDE cable and the molex connector to your system drive. Its possible that one or the other got knocked loose when you were putting in the network card but was still capable of a connection. Then after a little more activity, the connectivity went south on you. If no joy, try a different IDE cable and if still no joy, then have at it with Wildfire's suggestions.