Why does bios not detect my hard drive?

Ok, I had gotten a computer from my buddie and I decided to fix it up and use it....I tried to take out my hard drive out of my old computer and put it in my new one and it boots up saying "missing operating system" or somthing like that... then i read on the internet in order to boot from it you had to wipe it out and re install windows because the windows on the hard drive was designed for that old computer only....so i backed all my stuff up and put it back in the new computer and put a windows xp cd in.....pc loads then will come to the screen where it susposed to say "press anykey to boot from cd" BUT DOESNT SHOW IT and it continues to boot from cd...its as if i had alredy hit a key on my keyboard but didnt...so i continued the install and when it gets to the part where it needs to restart it will restart and will automaticly boot from cd...so i take the cd out and restart the computer and then it comes to that "missing operating system" screen....then i decided to see what bios Why does bios not detect my hard drive?
Ok, I had gotten a computer from my buddie and I decided to fix it up and use it....I tried to take out my hard drive out of my old computer and put it in my new one and it boots up saying "missing operating system" or somthing like that... then i read on the internet in order to boot from it you had to wipe it out and re install windows because the windows on the hard drive was designed for that old computer only....so i backed all my stuff up and put it back in the new computer and put a windows xp cd in.....pc loads then will come to the screen where it susposed to say "press anykey to boot from cd" BUT DOESNT SHOW IT and it continues to boot from cd...its as if i had alredy hit a key on my keyboard but didnt...so i continued the install and when it gets to the part where it needs to restart it will restart and will automaticly boot from cd...so i take the cd out and restart the computer and then it comes to that "missing operating system" screen....then i decided to see what bios was telling me and it was showing no hard drive at all..... then i tried checking the cabels....tried diffrent hard drives....tried diffrent cabels....an check the IDE port on the mobo with my cd rom drive...it works fine....its like this pc dosent want to read hard drives and thats it.....whats going on here?

Also my boot orders were set in many diffrent ways....but doesnt help

 

After combing through that mountainous post I think what you're saying is:
Your BIOS doesn't detect any hard drives no matter which cable you use, or which port.
Have you set the jumpers right?

 

Yep, This is so strange....i also forgot to mention that windows install will detect it when it asks me about partitions.

 

In that case, what's the problem?

 

I just deeply explained it....long story short..bios dosnt detect hard drives.....I tried to update my bios but i need that computer to run on windows b4 i can do that....