Hard drive failure, no drives detected

I did do a search prior to posting this.

First the specs:
Asus 7V333 motherboard
AMD Athlon XP 2600+
1 meg memory
2 hard drives divided into 2 logical drives each (Partition magic did it this way, I never figured out why)
- drive 1 = C: and E: - Master
- drive 2 = D: and F: - Slave
1 cdrw drive g:
1 dvd drive h:
Windows XP professional

When I booted up this morning my machine ran for awhile (20 min?) then I started hearing clicking noises and the drive activity light was solid. I started the shut down process and, after clearing the desktop of icons, I got an error screen of a stack error with memory dump which told me to turn off the computer. Upon reboot, my machine stops at the POST display. I get the message 'Disk boot failure, insert system disk and press enter'. Neither of the hard drives are shown on the POST display.

Question: did both drives fail? did the controller fail? Or is it because the Master drive failed that the slave drive isn't seen?

 

if you heard a sound, it sounds like the drive crashed. it's the only component that has moving parts in it (except fans).

 

Well now I'm confused. The computer booted after three restarts. Gonna make a backup NOW.

BTW, I figured that ONE of my drives had crashed, my question was why did the BIOS tell me that I had NO drives?

 

Replace the cable while you're at it.