I bought the pieces and setup a machine for a friend based on a Gigabyte GA
7VKML motherboard with the onboard Savage DDR video and AC 97 audio. He's
had this for a number of months and has been running Windows XP on it with
no problems.

Last week he had the PC on while he was watching TV in another room and it
just hung. On reboot the machine said it could find no boot device.

I've since been trying to get the machine to work, and have salvaged the
data from the Hard drive (A 40Gig SeaGate Baraccuda) by hooking it up to my
machine and using data recovery software. After I did this I reformatted the
hard drive and then put it back in his machine to re-install Windows XP.
Problem is, that the windows XP setup hangs on the screen that says
'Detecting your hardware' if the harddrive is plugged in. If the hard drive
is unplugged then the setup runs through with no problem, except that at the
end there's nowhere to install it.

If you start the install, then plug the Hard drive in part way through it's
loading of device drivers etc. Then when it comes to installing windows XP,
it finds the hard drive and installs it, but when it restarts the machine so
it can boot into windows to continue the install, it refuses to boot, saying
there's no valid boot disk.

If I take the hard-drive from this machine and now put it in mine, then
Windows XP boots up and the setup continues... put it back in the Machine
with the GA 7VKML motherboard, and it doesn't see it as a valid boot drive.

Also, I've created floppy boot disks and had no luck.

Also, I've tried flashing the bios up to the latest version (In steps from
the current F3 to F4 and so on to F...) but the Qflash program doesn't work
at all, and I can't boot of the floppy.

I've also successfully run a CD bootable version of linux on the machine,
and that's happy too.

I have now completely installed Windows XP on the hard drive by doing it all
in my machine, but on returning the hard drive to the original machine it
still refuses to boot from it.

Has anyone any insight into what the issue may be, or what I can do to
further try things?

Thanks in advance