Error message "Disk Boot Failure, Insert system Disk and press enter" on first build

Ok, I built a PC a month ago and everything seemed find no problems of any sort. The other night I defragmented my hard drive and shut it down and turned it on today to a memory test and the message "Disk Boot Failure, Insert system Disk and press enter"

The computer has access to the XP pro w/ sp2 disk only as a boot device but it will not recognize it now.

I have set Cd-rom as 1st for boot sequence then hard drive I have no floppy drive and the bios has been configured to know that.

I am not sure if this means anything but in the bios the IDE Channel 0 Master says none and when I try to turn on auto detection it wont detect a hard drive.

The HDD is fully connected and has not been touched since I installed it a month ago.

I have this awful feeling that I fried the HDD when I defragmented it last night.

Any help would be very much appreciated. But please be simple this is my first build and my knowledge at this sort of thing is very very sketchy at best.

The first thing to do would be to get a new data cable for the herd drive and see if that fixes it, they are nice and cheap nowadays.

You mean a serial ATA cable that connects the HD to the motherboard?

You didn't state that your hdd was sata but, yes, a new cable is worth a try.

no good, exact same message as last time