Lost the Drive/Bricked the Laptop

[Robert93]

Boy did I screw up. A friend asked me to repair her Asus laptop that she's had for a couple of years and was starting to run slow. I figured I would just do a restore but didn't see that option so I decided to use an HP recovery DVD that I had on hand, popped in the DVD, but it still booted to the HD, went into BIOS and changed it to boot to DVD first. When I booted to the HP recovery DVD I saw the machine had a had a 16GB recovery partition, which is what I wanted anyway So I removed the DVD and rebooted, but instead of it returning to Windows I got: "Reboot and Select proper Boot device or insert boot Media in selected Boot device and press a key." ----that was three hours ago!

When I go into BIOS (American Megatrends 2.14.1219) under Boot # 1 it shows "Windows Boot Manager --Drive Not Present.

When I go into Advanced/SATA configuration it shows the following:

Serial ATA Port 0
Device Type: Hard Disk (750GB)
Model Name: Hitachi
Serial Number: serial number
AND
Serial ATA Port 2
Device Type: ATAPI CDOM
Model Name: Slim Type DVD
Serial Number: Serial number

No ATA port 1, so I must have inadvertently deleted it, and the only two options in this Advanced SATA screen is to change the mode from AHCI to IDE, which I tried but either way the same error occurs, and NO other options.

I have no idea where to go from here, I've tried everything I can possibly think of, and instead of repairing her machine I've bricked it and don't even know for sure what I did wrong. Obviously any help is appreciated.

 

[hang-the-9]

You should not need an ATA port 1, you can see the drive on port 0.

There should be an option to set the BIOS to defaults, do that.

 

[Robert93]

You should not need an ATA port 1, you can see the drive on port 0.

There should be an option to set the BIOS to defaults, do that.

I tried that---forgot to mention this in original post---nothing changed

 

[hang-the-9]

Try reseating the hard drive. I don't see anything that should have caused the system not to see the drive that you did, although we can't see every step you tried or did, so maybe there was something that happened when you were trying to get it to boot off the DVD. Resetting the BIOS would have undone any changes you made.

 

[Robert93]

Took me a while to figure out how to open it----anyway, I opened it---took out the HD, booted it (to no hard drive obviously) reinserted and screwed down the HD again and no luck, still not showing the HD no matter what I do, and as mentioned in advanced/sata it's showing "Serial ATA Port 0
Device Type: Hard Disk (750GB)
Model Name: Hitachi
Serial Number: serial number"

But it's not finding it during boot. weirdest thing I've seen in a long time

 

[hang-the-9]

See what the drive mode is set to, ATA or AHCI, set it to whatever it's not and try it again.

 

[Robert93]

See what the drive mode is set to, ATA or AHCI, set it to whatever it's not and try it again.

Yup, tried that too--no luck. My thinking now is that the problem lies with the MBR. I've downloaded a couple of programs that are supposed to help fix that, if indeed that's the case.Depending how late I work, I'm going to try those tonight or tomorrow.