SATA1 hard drive not seen by BIOS anymore

I haven't had much success with storage at all because all my hard drive and USB drives have gone faulty and all on them on this very old PC except a few USB.

Motherboard: http://uk.msi.com/product/mb/K8T-Neo-FSR--FIS2R.html MS 6702 FSR-FIS2R

SATA1 hard drive: http://reviews.cnet.com/system-hard-drives/wd-caviar-blue-wd1600jd/4505-9989_7-31449806.html The hard drive is a Western Digital Caviar WD1600. It also says WD1600JD-55HBB0 on it. It doesn't spin up, or at least I couldn't hear it.

I've tried EVERY different combination of BIOS settings like SATA or RAID and lots more, jumpers, which place I plug the cable in, even trying plug in different disks along with it or CD or DVD stations, because this PC sometimes sees a device sometimes not and its "vision" changes sometimes when what is plugged in changes. Like when I add a DVD player it might see a disk or something else unexpected happens. I haven't been able yet to find a pattern so I have no idea what causes this weird phenomenon, but this disk is the only SATA device. All the rest are PATA.

I've tried also to update the firmware for this, but there isn't any and I've searched very long. However I've managed to update my BIOS from I think 1.0 to 7.1 (which is the latest and most probably the LAST version they will make for this motherboard; they haven't made a new one since 2006). Finally after giving up so many times and tried all of these combinations again without succeeding. ALL THIS took me at least someTEEN days from morning to late tomorrow night in frustration; these drives I have. I think almost everyone would give up but not Me until I've tried all I see fit. Also I've been to different forums and they just wrote to do what I already tried. Some of them didn't even read all.

THANK YOU for your time spent reading this.

The easiest way to troubleshoot the problem with your SATA hard drive would be to buy a USB SATA external hard drive enclosure. These devices are very inexpensive. Connect the portable hard drive enclosure to another computer.

• Is it properly detected as an external hard drive?
• Can you browse the files and folders on the hard drive?

If the answer to these questions is yes, then you probably have a problem with your old PC and not the SATA hard drive, and judging from your frustration with your old PC, it is probably time for you to buy a new computer.