OK so I'm posting this for a friend so its going to be hard to explain except what I've seen. He has an HP A230N and the hard drive won't load on startup. So when you go into the BIOS, it says that Primary Master and Primary Slave dont exist and its pulling up the Secondary Master and Secondary Slave. Then, its booting from 1. 3 1/2 floppy 2. USB Reader 3. I can't remember, but not a hard drive. Under Hard Drive options, it only shows USB READER, USB READER, USB READER. The question is, how can you get it to pick up the hard drive? Theres obviously one in there, so any heaps up?

It's possible the drive has died, which may render it undetectable by the BIOS (depending what components of the drive have failed). It's also possible an IDE cable or power cable might need re-seating. I'd start by checking all connections. Please let us know if you found someone's advice to be helpful.