Drive won't recognize

[unfaithfulsfan]

Don't know why this poopie always happens to me but, once again, if anyone can help me.....well, you know the drill

I finally get to upgrade the front PC which pretty much houses ALL the business data, accounting, etc. So this afternoon in between 6 other computers on the bench, I assembled the cpu, ram, dvd burner, etc into the new case. Then I shut down the old computer, pulled the modem and IDE hard drive to put in the new case. Booted it up

Boot Disk Error
Look in BIOS - no hard drive or DVD drive
Ran autodetect - no drive
Checked to make sure IDE is turned on in BIOS - it is

Thought maybe the board was bad so I tried another board - No drives
Said WTF, and put another IDE drive with customer image on it - booted right up, DVD drive recognized right away.

Same thing with a SATA drive

So I decided to put the old PC back together to try to image that way. The old computer won't recognize the new drive either WTF!?!?!?!?!?!

All drive jumpers are set correctly. I've checked every BIOS setting I know to check unless I missed something? Also tried to manually config new drive on old PC, no dice. and vice versa.

Anyone got any ideas how I can get out of this godawful mess so I can go home before midnight?

Old HDD = Seagate ST340810A
New HDD = WD WD800BB

New Mobo = Gigabyte GA-G31M-S2L
Old mobo = NotAClue. No serial or model number. No manufacturer data anywhere on it. It's Red. It's an AMD board tho for what that's worth. Don't know if there's a jumper setting on that board or not since there is no docs on it.

Thanks,
Jack

[DMB2000uk]

Did you get anywhere with this (seen as though you were hoping for a fix yesterday?).

Does the drive spin up when it's in any machine?

Are there any other drives of that make/model that you can steal the controller board from to use on the dodgy drive?

Dan

[unfaithfulsfan]

Sorry, I was here till midnight with the contrary thing and then the weekend was chaotic to put it very mildly. My idea of using Acronis and backing up the entire drive to my computer then restoring the backup to a new drive worked (finally) Still had to do a repair install and reload some drivers but it's up and running this morning.

When I get a chance I'll try looking more into why two seemingly (spec-wise) identical drives wouldn't recognize together. The old drive wouldn't even show up as a primary boot drive on my PC no matter how I jumpered it. So very strange.

Thanks, Dan, as always!
Jack