Dell Dimension 8200 IDE not detected

[apainlessend]

I am fixing my girls computer, and she is flipping out on me. I really need help.
She waned me to back it up, and reinstall windows.

She bought an 80gb usb drive

I back up her drive, but when i restarted the computer to begin installing windows I get this error:

Stike f1 to retry boot, strike f2 for set up.


When I go into setup, the devices say NOT INSTALLED
And when I ctrl F it says "Unknown Device"

I reboot, and it does and IDE scan, then back to Strike f1

HELP!!!!

MY service tag is 2fly811


PLEASE HELP!!!

 

[mailpup]

Did you set the BIOS to boot from the CD drive first?

 

[apainlessend]

Thats jsut it, its not reading ANY ide drive

Everything says unknown device

 

[mailpup]

How did you go about backing up the hard drive?

 

[apainlessend]

First i just copy and pasted to the usb drive.
Then i used hd clone for a full backup.

When windows was loading it did the disk error checking, then rebooted and ive been stuck with this bs ever since.

 

[mailpup]

When you first start the PC, do you have the option to press F12 to enter the boot menu? This a way to temporarily change the boot device without entering the BIOS (setup) itself. If so, are your various drives listed (hard drive, optical drives, floppy)?

Also, just checking, make sure the USB drive is unplugged.

 

[apainlessend]

they were before..
Now just the floppy shows

Ive unplugged replugged all ide and pwr connects too. no detection.

and usb has been removed.
bios version is a03 btw

 

[mailpup]

If the BIOS isn't detecting your other drives, something must have happened when you backed up the hard drive although I can't imagine what. It shouldn't have affected the BIOS. The only thing I can think of now is to reset the BIOS by removing the battery for several minutes (after unplugging the power supply). Of course this involves opening the case to remove the battery from the motherboard. After you replace the battery, the BIOS should reset to its default values and hopefully re-detects the hard drive and CD/DVD drives.

If that doesn't work, I'm stuck for the moment.

 

[apainlessend]

wait, i left the battery out over night, but i didnt remove the power from the motherboard.
Im trying that now

 

[mailpup]

Unplugging the power supply is mainly a precaution against accidentally shorting anything. Replace the battery and see if it helped.