No boot device avaiable :*(

[whiteoral]

So my mom's harddrive went bad a couple of weeks ago. I finally went over to Microcenter and got her a new one and get the dreaded "no boot device available" message.

HDD is 160gb WD SATA OEM
Computer is dell e510

I went to setup and put "Onboard or usb cd-rom" as first on boot order, restarted, and got the message. I checked to see if the optical drive and HDD cables were secure, same message.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[oshia86]

You can put the hard drive as first on boot order. I find its nice in case you leave a game in the cd-rom. Also on a 939 system i had the sata ports i used were #3 and #4 due to the fact that those ports were locked for overclocking. The thing about these ports were that they were driven by a different chip than the other two and after a hard bios reset i would have to enable the chip (southbridge i think its referred to but im unsure) or else it wouldn't detect the drive like whats happening with you.