I bought a new MSI board and P4 chipset not two weeks ago. Everything worked great until this morning. I'm running the vacuum while waiting on the kids to get ready for school and as I'm running by the computer case the display light on the case goes out. I figure I must have bumped the power button so didn't think much of it until I reached down to turn it back on and it fails to boot. Error message on the screen indicates that it can't locate a bootable drive. I restart and go into the bios and it doesn't detect any IDE drives only the floppy and the SATA DVD drive. I verified the HD was powering up and I tried another IDE cable. What now? Could I have EMP'd it with the vacuum running close to it?

EMP'd it?? eitherway, in the bios have you attempted to do an autodetect of all the devices?? too see if the HD shows up?

I was trying to refer to the vacuum cleaner zapping it with an electro-magnetic field of some kind (I guess I still have 'The Matrix' on the brain). I've gone into bios and it doesn't see the HD or CD Rom at all (both on same IDE cable).

Whew! I cleared the cmos and it booted right up. I had disabled the bios protection during a bios update and I didn't re-enable it so maybe that is why it was able to wig out? All I know is that the case is going on top of the desk whether the Mrs. likes it or not!

Did you get completely out of the Matrix before you cleard the BIOS??

You can get.....out?

just hack in do the dmz mainframe in front of the matrix server farm, with a small uploadable exploited hack you can remove yourself from the LAN and get out to the WAN. but be careful, you will need your own firewall installed.

glad you got it working, I have a similar problem with adding drives to my machine, I have to "auto-scan" each time for the devices to be recognized by the bios.