Dell forum: Not finding any IDE devices

My neighbor has asked my help fixing their computer which they have had problems with. They had asked that i just wipe it and reinstall windows XP.

My first problem was the xp install couldn't recognize the sata hard drive that was attached to it. Luckily i had an extra IDE hard drive so i installed xp onto that. It worked fine i loaded up into XP and all was fine. I opened up device manager and saw a lot of drivers missing so i went to get drivers. I had to get the drivers that came with the board so that the ethernet and some other things worked. I also had to open it up to get the wireless card model to get drivers for that. So i shut it down and opened it up, then proceded to download drivers on one of my comps onto a flash drive. when i returned and restarted the computer (the one im working on) it couldn't detect any IDE devices. I tried replacing cables, different cd drive, nothing. I have tried many things and none seem to work. It doesn't detect them at all, the bios simply says no device detected... with that i seem to have reached the end of my knowledge and could really use help


The computer is a dell deminsion 8400