Can't Load OS?!?!?

[ithaca00]

I built my first computer Saturday with the help of a friend who has done many computers before and I am having some major problems.

After going through the BIOS, putting in the OS CD and booting up, the computer goes through it's normal boot up procedure and checks for Primary and Secondary IDE drives but comes back with "No drives found". I currently have a Sony DVD drive as the Secondary Master and a Liteon CDRW as the primary slave but it doesn't show up upon boot up. These drives do show up in the bios and POST screens. Also, when going through the boot up the drives spin up like they're loading/reading the CD.

Next the PCI bus table shows up and below that I get the message "Error loading OS" (or something to that effect). So, for some reason it's not recognizing the two drives attached.

The first time that I tried to boot up I got XP to load but when I went to format the HDD it hung up. I left it for about an hour and it still showed a 0% completed format. I restarted, without changing anything, and got the problems I mentioned above

Can anyone help me out?!?!?


My setup:
ASUS A7N8X Deluxe Rev 2.0
AMD Athlon XP 2500+
(2x) 512 Mb Crucial PC3200 memory
an ASUS 4x video card
160 GB Maxtor HDD
Sony 16x DVD
Liteon 52x32x52 CDRW

 

[lucky9]

first check jumpers and cables.

 

[ithaca00]

I've taken off all the cables for the drives and put them back on, tried new ones but nothings working. I'll take a look at the jumpers in the morning but I don't think I had to change anything.