draziw 0 Newbie Poster

One day in the distant past (2 days ago) I turned off my computer. All was fine. When I went to turn it back on, and after seeing "verifying dmi addresses....." I get the message "Error loading OS" . I have important data on the hard drive and hope there is a fix to get to this data. The hard drive is a SATA drive if that makes a difference. I would resort to installing some form of Linux to try and get at the data befor I would Reformat. The crux is, I do not even see the hard drive in my bios! The SATA wire is good, and the motherboard is good, (tested using another hard drive) . I have a second hard drive, (IDE) that works fine (I can still see it in my bios and i have been able to browse the data on it ok). Please, please help and realize that reformating is an absolute last resort. I have be scouring the internet for two day to fix the problem but to no avail. Thank you for any input at all, and if you have none thatnks for your time nonetheless.