Strange BIOS problem

[Niverive]

Ok I'll try to explain this as clearly as possible but its hard without pictures, I'll see if I can try to take pics later with someone's phone or something, but here we go.

My room mate got basically an entire different computer, my friend gave him his old motherboard, CPU, memory, and video card. He said they worked fine before he got a new computer. So anyways he didn't get a case so we go out and buy a case and I put everything in there for him, hooked everything up, and well this is hard to explain but here we go.

Basically the BIOS won't fully detect both the hard drive and DVD drive at once, but it will half-way detect it, kinda confusing but its like this. I have the DVD drive plugged into the BLUE IDE port on the MOBO and the HDD plugged into the top RED IDE, if I watch the IDE Detection Screen, the HDD and DVD Drive come up, but in the actual BIOS it only detects the DVD Drive, if I let it try to boot from hard drive it'll start booting windows and then just reboot (remember it doesn't show up in the BIOS but it starts booting windows from it?), if I switch the IDE cords so that the HDD is plugged into the BLUE IDE and the DVD in the RED IDE, its exactly the other way around, DVD drive doesn't show up in BIOS but the HDD will and windows will boot all the way on the HDD, but we need to reinstall and format his hard drive so I'm stuck in a fix. Any suggestions? Or need me to clarify anything? I'll check back here often thanks

 

[Baez]

The cable you're using is bad. If either one that's plugged in with the red doesn't show up that should tell you right there. The blue end of the IDE cable should be plugged into the motherboard not a drive. If Windows is restarting after you get a new cable you most likely need either to a repair install or reformat the drive and do a new install.