I turned on my computer the other day and I got a boot disk failure message...The bios is not detecting my primary hard drive with the OS on it so windows won't load. I have tried booting with just the one hard drive connected and still does not work. I also tried another IDE cable in case the one i was using was no longer good and that did nothing. Then I tried taking the hard drive out and I put it in an external enclosure and the drive reads no problem when I plug it into my USB on my Laptop. This shows that the hard drive is still good and the OS on the hard drive should still be good because when it is installed in the priginal computer the BIOS does not even pick it up. What could be causing this?? Any help is appreciated, Thanks

Bad IDE controller on motherboard. Move to next port and retry. Also it could be the bootable area or still could be the drive. Drives have a small ram are to tell bios what it is. Even a virus can cause this. I read it wrong and answer it wrong too. So get off my case you goober.

Your IDE channel may be dead. If you had more than one device connected to that cable and channel try disconnecting the other device. You may need to then move the jumper on the Boot drive to set as master alone. The reason I suggest removing the other device is because it may be defective and causing the problem. Also, enter the BIOS screens and verify that both IDE channels are enabled there. If none of that helps then the only recourse would be to abandon the primary channel and connect the boot drive to the secondary channel and set the boot options to match. If you neede both channels then you will need to buy a controller card.

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Thank you for your help guys, much appreciated.