Boot disk problem.

[boggom]

A friend gave me an old pc that, according to him, had hard drive problems. I then got some RAM for it and took the secondary bootable harddrive from my pc to try and get it going. The BIOS is detecting both the harddrive and optical drive by name and spec but as soon as it needs to boot it gives error message to insert prober boot disk. I've tried both the harddrive and a Windows XP bootable cd always giving same error. Putting the harddrive back in my pc it works fine. Could this be the motherboard, and if so how is that possible?
Anybody with some ideas...?
(It is an older system - socket 478 ASUS M/B)

 

[cfvh600]

Did you check the boot order in the BIOS? Make sure the BIOS is set to boot from the drives detected.

 

[stroebs]

Other than checking the boot order, set all the BIOS settings do default, change the boot settings, make sure the jumpers are correct on both the Hard Drive and the optical drive.

 

[kronoSX]

make sure the jumpers are correct and that there is power on the plugs,very important.Is there any other errors if you swop the ide ports.

 

[boggom]

I basically checked everything that you guys mentioned, I even put the two drives on their own IDE port and cable and swopped around as well. Do you guys think it can be because of a fault on the motherboard, hence the fact that they chucked the pc because of "harddrive problems"? Is this possible?

 

[ponder]

Tried re-flashing the BIOS with the same or newer version?

The bootstrapping firmware in the BIOS loads and executes the MBR (master boot record) on the hard drive.

It could be hardware related, try running micro-scope to see if it picks up any problems.