No Bios? No hard drives detected

Hi,
My wife has a PC with 2 SATA drives and it has been working fine for about 3 years. Now, when we came to boot it up it would start to load windows the screen would go dark nothing else would happen. We rebooted pressed the Tab key and got a screen with the boot settings in we didn't alter anything in that just exited and rebooted. Now it doesn't even try to boot windows. We can't get the boot screen back by pressing the Tab key. It just goes to another screen saying. VIA Technologies, Inc VIA VT8237 Serial ATA RAID BIOS Setting Utility V2.01

Scan Devices, Please wait....
Press <Tab> key into user window!

Hardware initiate failed, Please check device!!!
The BIOS does not be installed. Press <g> to continue!

When we do that we get the first screen we get when we boot up saying:
Press DEL to enter setup
Press <F8> for BBS POPUP
then it lists the controllers
then lists
Auto detecting Sec Master...ATAPI CD-ROM
Sec Master: SONY DVD RW DW_U14A 1.0d
ULTRA DMA Mode -2
Auto Detecting USB Mass Storage devices..
00 USB Mass storage devices found and configured.

NO Hard Disk Drive Detected.
Press F1 to resume.

When we select F8 we get a choice of the DVD drive or the floppy drive.

I hope I have explained well enough and hope someone can help. Thanks

Steve

 

It sounds like your RAID controller has gone wonky. Please post info about your motherboard (just the make and model will suffice if you don't have anything else - people will research), as well as that of your RAID controller.

 

Mada Milty,

Thanks for your reply. It looks like it was a bad 2nd hard drive. It was making a ticking noise whilst trying to boot up. Once I disconected it the pc booted up ok.

Steve