harddrive not found

please help i am trying to help a friend with a desktop that was given to him i will give u as much detail as posable to save time it is a dell gx50 when he got the computer and booted it windows 7 came up but said it needed a activation code he called and got it after entering it he said it got so far then acted like files were missing when i got there and tried to boot it it would show it was loading windows but would just stop on second screen when i took it home i sent it with a friend that messed with it before i could get it he tried to load and old os on there he had it got so far and said hard drive nor found i looked in bios and it is not detected when i open case it seems the hard drive has been replaced i followed the install hard drive instructions to see if it was installed wrong only thing is i not sure of the master setting the hard drive is not marked with manufacturer and all i see is a little bump where the plastic setting is so a assume it is set to master have read it could be the battery on the motherboard so will replace it today but seems that if it was loading windows 7 from hard drive originally not sure thats the battery is it so what do u all think think

 

That is a pretty old unit to try to run Win7 on.

Which version of BIOS is running? A04 or A06?

Try hitting F12 during the Dell screen and see if you get the option to boot from HD. If HD is listed choose that number and see if it boots.

 

the bios is A04 and bios set up does not show hard drive but when i was over there it was so not sure if the other dude did something

 

There are some BIOS fixes in the A06 version so that may be a consideration later if you really get stuck.

Most likely it was a settings change while you were working or the HD is failing.

Unplugging the PC and taking the battery out for 5 minutes and then putting the battery back in and plugging it back in will force BIOS to reset itself to defaults. So I would do that.

Then try the F12 to manually choose to boot from HD and see what happens.

Unless your friend changed the jumper on the HD it should be set correctly. You could remove the cable from the CDROM and try attaching the HD to the CDROM cable and see if it boots from there.

 

ok i want to thank u all i did what u said and it was the cable i reformatted the hard drive and loaded xp on it and it is a working find so the problem was they were trying to run windows 7 with 256 ram so it crashed then there was the cable problem thanks again