Please help with this PC issue

[jmu1016]

hey everyone new to your forum been reading around and like what I see. My situation is I am working on a coworkers PC. He has a asus a7v8x-x board with a 2600+ xp chip. 512 mb ram. he gave the pc and the ntldr was missing so I figured no problem reload xp for him. Well the pc shut down during the reformat twice. Replaced his power supply with an extra one I had and xp loaded fine, when the machine rebooted after the system files copied down the hard drive is not recognized in bios at all. Swapped out my bios battery as well and the ide cable...... Can this be a bad motherboard (IDE controller) and if so can I just put in a add on card or do I need to replace the board? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Mike

 

[Regs]

Have you considered it being a bad hard drive? The ASUS mobo should not be failing like how your explaining it. It's a possibility that it could be the motherboard, but my money is on a bad hard drive.

 

[LTC8K6]

Yep, I would be looking at the HD.