pc wont boot

My brother's new p4 2.4ghz w/an asus p4p800 motherboard will not boot passed its asus logo screen in the beginning. Sometimes, it will allow us to enter setup and look at settings, and sometimes it freezes. When we are able to enter, everything looks fine other than on the boot up devices the hard drive does not show up...only the floppy and dvd drive. However, it does list the hard drive on the primary master IDE. Even if we tell it to boot from the dvd first with an xp install cd in drive it still will not make it passed the asus logo in the beginning, but we can hear the dvd drive spinning. I noticed that there was no case fan installed in his new computer and the hard drive seemed to be warm to the touch. Im wondering if somethihng could have been fried? PC monitoring in the bios says that the cpu is at 41C and the mb temp is 29C. I have a feeling this is a hardware problem....any advice on what to do next would be greatly appreciated.

 

(1) reset cmos
(2) set harddrive jumper correctly, WD harddrive (single) NO jumper (with) secondary (needs jumper set)
(3) correctly set your (FSB)
(4) correctly set your cpu settings
(5) memory using, you never said?
(6) harddrive warm (normal)
(7) You must be more specific on your system to get a trouble shooting stepbystep outcome for your system.

 

If you can manage to get into the setup, try disabling the ASUS splash screen, sometimes called "quickboot". This might let you see where it is hanging.

 

ok, first off...its got 512mb pc3200 ram. Secondly, i was able to get into the cmos and disable the splash screen which let me see the checks. Everything checks fine including the ram, but when it detects IDE Primary Master its say "Primary Master Hard Disk Error". When i go into the cmos it does not list my hard drive under the primary master and if i push enter in attempts to modify <none> option it locks up. So i tried loading the fail safe defaults and it did nothing. This computer was running fine for the entire first day....dont think the jumpers or any of that would be the problem since it was working fine.