My friend is having me fix his old dell desktop. I knew for sure the hard drive had already failed so I already planned on getting another one. The weird part was before I even bought the new HDD the motherboard was saying that sata 1 had no device installed but the optical drive was installed there. I put in the new hard drive and used an external dvd writer and the dell windows vista reinstall disc. Everything went fine. Vista installed, the computer was working, all the drivers were installed, I tested the drive and it passed all the tests. I installed some updates and restarted the computer and now bios tells me that theres nothing installed on sata 0 either.....seriously...wtf...
I just replaced the Sata cabe with a new Sata cable and now the computer has booted up. and is configuring the updates....im still very concerned about the mobo being a bad one.
I have done a full HDD test and did a memtest on the ram. Those components seem to be fine.