Boot Problem

You don't say whether the system was booting properly before, which affects what is the likely source of the problem. First, when you go into the BIOS utility, do you see the drives there? Probably not, or you'd see them at the boot menu, but it's worth a look. Now, you say "hard drives." If you have more than one hard drive configured on an IDE channel, make sure you have them jumpered properly as master and slave or cable select, if you're using cable select. On the obvious side, make sure the cable is securely seated in the connector on the motherboard and at the drives. Make sure the power connectors are seated, too.

Try putting the drives one at a time on the cable (making sure they're jumpered properly, of course) and see if the BIOS sees a single drive. If you can see the drives one at time, re-check your jumpering. If you can't see the drives one at a time, try connecting them to another machine, if possible, and make sure you can see them there. Make sure you can boot from the drive that's your boot drive while you're at it.

If you're really sure everything's OK with drives, cables, jumpering, etc., see if there's a diagnostic utility available for the system and make sure the IDE controller (which I'm presuming is onboard) is working properly. Check for BIOS upgrades, too.

Have you checked the power and data cables to see if they are secure on the drive and on the system board? What type of drives - SATA or IDE? Check the jumpers on the drives, make sure they are set correctly (cable select or master/slave - whichever is recommended by your system manufacturer).

The system was booting properly before,they are IDE drives,the drive cables are connected properly and configuration mstr/slave is jumpered correctly.
Troubleshooting over the phone and cannot verify that drives are showing up on post screen

what os? if this used to work and suddenly does not, my ideas are:
virus
cmos settings
check bios settings, try to force autodetection of the drive, double check that bios drive settings look ok, that they havent been reset to defaults incompatible with the drives (due to extended power outage that did in the cmos battery)
if they show up in bios but not in windows,
long shot they had a boot sector virus. ask about their virus protection and did they accidently boot any floppys lately.
as you know...steps to fix depend on os version...

The OS is Windows ME

My first thought is that Windows Update installed a driver for the wrong chip-set.

This can cause the exact symptoms you describe.

Either that, or a virus.

As a first step, you need to walk them through entering BIOS setup to verify that the BIOS is seeing the hard drives.

While in BIOS setup, especially if they cannot see the hard drive, check the clock.
If the time is way off, the BIOS might have been reset. Or, they need a new CMOS battery.

Another possibility is that this is a motherboard or system with a secondary IDE controller.
If the boot drive is connected to an alternate IDE controller such as on-board RAID, or a PCI IDE controller card, it is very possible for the BIOS to not see the boot drives.

Is there any way that they could send you a picture of the insides of the case?
Specifically, where the IDE cables go.

If the system does have a special IDE controller, they may need to change the BIOS boot device settings in order to boot from the hard drive.

Chas

If you boot from a floppy or CD does it see c:\? If so try the Ultimate Boot CD at:
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

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