here's some hope: windows knows there's a disc plugged in. it says it's "unknown", but it at least knows it's there. that's more than the bios can say. so, i'm going to throw on a temp install and see if it reads it...

i had a problem with my laptop's hard drive last month that in the end turned out to be a corrupted mbr. regarding the laptop, it was minor in the end cause....just reformat and that's that. but i cannot format this drive under any circumstance. and i even don't care about the hardware. it's almost ten years old. i don't think 250 gb drives are even on the market anymore.