Not detecting IDE

Hope someone can help with this, last week I kept getting the message "Boot Disk Failure Insert System Disk"
After reading a thread I changed the grey cable from the hard drive to the motherboard and all was fine for a week now I get as far as detecting IDE drive and every thing stops there, also I can't get into the BIOS to see if the drive is reconised
I have a Norton Ghost backup but can't change the boot from HDD to CD as I can't get into the BIOS
Would appreciate any help with this.

Happy New Year

 

I think we need a bit more information, 21st.

Let's start with what you were aiming for when you changed the cable connecting your hard drive to the motherboard. What was the objective? Can you put it back the way it was? What happened when you did?

What's the make and model of the motherboard? With that info, someone here can probably tell you how to get into the BIOS to change the boot order if Googling the motherboard model number doesn't get you that information. (BTW -- have you got the motherboard manual around?)

You say that the boot process gets as far as detecting the connected drives. Does the POST successfully identify the drive? What drive is it? (If the BIOS can identify the drive, it may not be a drive cable issue.)

The error message you get usually comes up when the BIOS is able to interrogate the drive, looks for a Master Boot Record, and does not find one that it can boot from. The MBR could have been corrupted or overwritten.

Another possible cause of that error message is a drive controller failure. There are several things you can do to confirm or eliminate that possibility, but I won't offer any until I know what filesystem(s) are on that drive. Without that knowledge, I might suggest something that gets unreliable results and causes you to wipe the drive when it wasn't necessary.