Acer Travelmate 290 won't recognise hard disk

[kaltenjm]

Hello,
I was refreshing the Windows XP of a friend's
Acer Travelmate 290 :

I had to delete the password of the Setup : success

I had to alter the boot sequence (I think originally it was: 1 -diskette (nonexistant) 2 -harddisk, 3 - CD )to launch UBCD4WIN from CD
Thereupon the harddisk was not recognised by the BIOS

The harddisk being not recognised by the BIOS it does not appear in the setup and is not listed in UBCD4WIN

I found reference to this problem under this address:

http://www.hardwareforums.com/help-16938/

Any help would be appreciated

 

[kaltenjm]

I tried various things and came out with these answers:

- the disk is correctly recognised in POST as IDE drive. I obtained another disk and it was also correctly recognised in POST

- Setup does not recognise either hard disk -it says "No HD"

I tried out UBCD (DOS version). It is full of utilities . One of them:- Hitachi fitness test recognised the HD as:
No. 00 ATA (!!!) primary master IC25N060ATMR04
It also listed the CD drive as:
No. 01 ATAPI secondary master slimtype DVDRW SDW-4

It analysed the disk correctly but on the Function Test it said "Device is Password protected and can not be tested" Disposition Code 0x22

The Setup has a password setting facility for User and Supervisor but the hard drive lock is greyed out

So that's all I have to contribute - I gladly await your comments