[RandyL]

I agree with tootech and danzil although they both know more then I ever will.

You have an IDE. It does not show in the BIOS.
Unknown SATA probably means that the BIOS supports it but you don't have one.

If it can't find the primary IDE it's probably going to the next supported drive in the boot sequence is my guess which of course is a SATA drive which you don't have. Unknown device usually denotes that fact.

Although it should not make a difference but it might go back into the BIOS and make sure of the boot sequence. That is make sure if you have both SATA and IDE listed that your IDE is set to boot before the unknown SATA. Or if possible remove the SATA from the boot sequence alltogether.

I too fear the drive has failed. A new IDE drive and reinstalling is probably the only option at this point. Well at least the most likely option. Not sure if your recovery disks will work on a SATA as yours shipped with an IDE. Or if you even have SATA connectors.

DATA RECOVERY

Often times possible by connecting via a caddy on a failed computer such as with a MOBO fault or sometimes with a FAILING hard drive. The problem is that if a drive is too far gone or depending on what caused the drive failure it won't help.

If it is a drive problem due to the drive itself it might take a specialist and be extremely expensive as Tootech said unless the fault is repairable but even then if it is it would not be cheap.

As danzil said a caddy might be an option if the drive has not totally failed or if it is related to other computer faults. But even then if it is not you are out of the money on that.

Since it is an IDE another option to try is to slave the original desktop drive to another desktop computer and copy the data over but you will need to connect the ribbon cable properly and set the jumper pins to slave on the secondary drive.

This would preclude the minimal cost of a caddy but in your particular case I doubt it would help as I suspect your drive is too far gone.

But as you said the good news is that you already have most of what is important to you backed up on external media. Always a good idea.

In my opinion a new hard drive and a reinstall might well fix your problem although there are no absolute garauntees just probabilities.