Boot disk not found start up error

Bonehead, your hard drive crashed! Which I thought immediately, but here are the symptoms: User returns after weekend to good ol’ blue screen, apparently someone was messing with his NT workstation over the weekend. I reboot it and get a Boot disk not found, insert start up disk yada yada. I notice the CD rom light is lit and won’t open. For grins I disconnect the CD and reboot, volah, the system boots up, replace CD and volah, system boots up. Well, aparently not so…The system hung up on him opening Oracle, reboot, same problem, won’t detect Primary Master (Maxtor HD) or Secondary (CD). Which was the problem in the first place (not detecting IDE drives), Is it the IDE controller on the motherboard?