Mr. Hope B2.0
Boot the computer with a bootable diskette or a Windows 2000, XP, or Vista setup CD. If you're using a bootable floppy disk run the fdisk command from the A:\> prompt and see if it is detecting the drive. Or if you're using a Windows CD attempt to run setup and see if it's seeing the hard disk drive.
Using either of the above methods is the hard disk drive being detected?