slow to find hard drive on cold boot

Iam working on this computer for my neighbors daughter. I just replaced the 40gb hard drive on a hp pavillion 510n with a 160 gb WD Caviar SE EIED I installed xp pro and did all updates. all seemed fine until i was testing it one last time the next day. when i started it up i got a black screen with Disk Boot Failure. Insert System Disk And Press Enter. so i made sure there wasn't a disk in the drive and(there wasn't) restarted the computer, and it booted fine. so i put the case back together and start it up and again i get the same message. i rebooted and went to the bios and it said none for hard drive. so i looked things over for a min in the rest of the bios and then the hard drive pops up and is now listed in the bios. the computer seems slow to find the drive only on cold boots, but only 95% of the time the other 5% it boots fine when cold. I have been struggling with this for a few weeks because nobody seems to have the answer i need to fix this. If it was my computer i would have thrown it away by now cuz its not worth the trouble. do u have any ideas that may solve this issue.

 

Did you use new ribbon cables or the old ones?

Are you using 80-pin ribbon cables or the old 40-pin ones?

Make sure the MB contacts for the IDE are clean and that the cable ends are fully inserted at both ends. You can use contact cleaner.

 

I tried different ribbons and it didnt help. they are 40 pin and when i was given this computer to fix it had been sitting in a basement that was being sheet rocked and had not been used in over a year. the first thing i did was open and clean it but i suppose there could still be dust in there. I tried a brand new ribbion and it is a new hard drive so what else could there be to clean?

 

Most newer IDE drives do not like 40-wire IDE cables as they allow too much interference between the wires. Therefore 80-wire, but still 40-pin, ribbons are used. The extra 40 wires act as interference blockers between the data cables but they are not connected.

 

Try changing the setting in BIOS from auto detect and set the parameters manually, it seems like the drive may not be initiating in time for auto detection.

A work around might be to let it POST then just before it hands over to the operating system hit control alt delete and let it POST again.