A bit of computer trouble: BIOS sees IDE drives, winxp doesn't

[Guerrilla]

Figured I'd toss this out here, because I've spent two evenings on this so far and can't sort it out.

I did a bit of upgrading and wouldn't you know it, something broke.

Let's get the techy bits out of the way first.
Was running an E6600 on an Asus P5b Wifi board with 4GB RAM and an Asus 7900GT. Had 3 drives set up. A 37GB WD Raptor as a clean OS drive (just OS, browser, mailclient, litestep), a 250GB IDE Seagate and a Samsung Writemaster DVD-Writer (IDE). Nice clean setup. Very responsive, very stable.

That was until yesterday I finally received my brand new Q9450 (only took 3 months). Got home, opened up the machine yanked out the old CPU and put in the new one. Start the machine up and... nothing happens. No POST, no beep codes, no video signal.

That's cool though. Ruled out bad connections and shorts by taking the whole machine apart (I swear, zalman coolers are exclusively made out of sharp edges and malice) and putting it back together. No POST. Reset CMOS. No POST. Put the old CPU in, got POST (and one seriously freaked out BIOS), so everything's still more or less running.

Fired up the laptop and searched the Internet for answers. Turns out I need a BIOS upgrade to run the new 45nm CPUs on the 2 year old board. No worries, find a USB stick, yank out everything non-essential and 4 minutes and later my BIOS is up to date (although still freaked out about the CMOS reset). Fixed the BIOS, put in the new chip and got POST. Brilliant. Stuck the HDD tray back in and reconnected everything hoping to get some serious rendering underway.

Get to windows, put on good a song, hit play and... nothing happens. Player nags about not finding my music anywhere. Odd. Maybe the drive lettering got out of whack with the BIOS flashing or something. Fire up Explorer and find out that I only have a C:. Reboot to confirm that BIOS sees all IDE drives like it should, reconnect everything and... nothing. Can't see either of the damn drives.

So far I've tried:

1) Moving jumpers around. Managed to make BIOS lose the drives, but got them back when I put the jumpers back where they were.
2) Updated the chipset, RAID controller and Wireless LAN (Integrated on the MoBo) drivers once or twice. Curiously enough the WLAN isn't working either, but I reckon I'll worry about the drives first.
3) Uninstalled and Re-Installed all IDE Controllers once or twice.
4) Booted with the xp cd. Recovery console let me poke around D: and all the data is still there. Also proves that the DVD drive works at boot-up. It's not broken until Windows starts.
5) Poked around Disk Management. Neither of the IDE devices make an appearance
6) Yelled and cursed at it. A lot.

Probably a few other things too, but the bloodloss the sharp fans caused is affecting my memory.

OS is a nlite slipstreamed XPSP3 32-bit.

Sorry for the long-winded post, but I figured I should include everything so that I don't miss some stupidly obvious little thing.

So, any ideas?

I realise at least one of you is going to say 're-install' which is fine. I built the system to make it easy to restore should it go tits up, but I'm looking for the less obvious and time consuming methods here. If all those fail, I'll wipe it and re-install.

[aszazeroth]

I'd reinstall the OS... take the hit directly, save you the trouble later along the line.

[Guerrilla]

It's not the OS installation that I dread. That takes like 20 minutes tops. It's the apps.

[aszazeroth]

>apt-get install blender inkscape gimp scribus

straight in the Ubuntu prompt as root

[Guerrilla]

When that works for apps I actually use, I'll switch to Linux.

[Northern_Mind]

It's a must to re-install the operating system after a major update like changing the cpu. Heck it's a must to re-install XP every 6 months

[Guerrilla]

No it's not. Just need to do a bit of housekeeping every now and then.

[Northern_Mind]

hah thats true my house is a bit unclean at the moment

[rojren]

Once upon a time (Can't remember if it as Win98 or WinXP) my PC did something like that.

I had to go into the Tweak UI utility, and under My Computer + Drives and re-check several of the drives so Windows would see them.

[J3SSE]

That sure is a wierd problem - you've already done what I would have done in that situation, namely look to see if there was an updated controller driver for your board. Interesting that you're using IDE rather than Sata, hmmm.... I dunno - if there aren't any updated mass storage controller drivers for your motherboard, maybe there's a BIOS tweak out there for a this issue?
My search-fu is weak, sorry can't be much help

Edit: Forgot to ask if any 3rd party disk config tools eg. Acronis or Partition Magic can see the drives? - I'd expect the answer to be no if the OS doesn't see them.