A friend of mine was no longer able to get into Windows XP on her PC and wanted to save a lot of digital photos. So I took her PC, removed her HD and swapped it with my secondary HD. (My PC has a primary SATA drive w/ the OS and a secondary IDE drive for storage). When I turned on my PC, for some reason it booted off of her drive I had swapped in. I wanted to get online to do some troubleshooting so I removed her HD and put mine back in. That is when the "strike f1 to retry reboot, strike f2 to enter setup" error message starting occurring. I have reset my BIOS and cleared NVRAM. I believe I did this correctly because each time afterwards it would attempt the automatic IDE configuration. Anyways, the BIOS is not recognizing ANY of my drives (2 dvd drives, the primary sata HD, and the original secondary IDE HD).

Any help would be much appreciated, thank you!

Check all the cable connections, power supply, and make sure everything is configured in the bios. Check your boot device order as well, though if it can't recognize that may not be available.

What kind of harddrives are they, can we have any more details. It is tough to tell exactly why it can't see them, but there are really three options

1)Hardware is damaged
2)Hardware is not connected or configured properly
3)Bios is not configured correctly

It is very strange that it can't see any of your drive, especially considering CDROMS should be an autodetect. Is your motherboard ok, how are the connections?

Lastly if you have a floppy, you may want to try flashing your bios to the latest version, but be careful your computer does not shut off during the process.

Also, try booting with just your primary hard drive in. I am out of ideas for now, but I am sure some other board members will give you even better insight. Good luck.

Thanks for the start. My primary drive is a Seagate SATA ST3120026AS. I'm not sure what my secondary drive is but I know it's a Seagate IDE 120gb. The friend's secondary drive that I swapped in which started this mess is a Samsung IDE SV4002H.

The only reason I doubt it's hardware is because I didn't change a thing besides just swapping the secondary HD's.

Resetting the BIOS didn't work but I guess I can try flashing it.

The PC and MB have been great up til now. I have no idea what swapping this secondary HD has done to it.

Flashing the BIOS for this issue is not advised. The problem is not the BIOS or you wouldn't have accessed the drives before.

During the course of installing the friend's drive did you enter the BIOS screens at any time? If so, what changes did you make?

I also suggest checking the cabling. Did you change any drive jumpers or position any drives on different cables or different positions on the cable?