Hard drive not recognised in bios

Hi I'm having a lot of trouble with a compaq mini 702ea. It initially came up with a hdd failure so replaced the hdd, after a day came up hdd bad again. I then replace the small orange cable which made no difference. I tried both faulty and new hdd in USB case on another machine and formatted them. When I try to load windows 7 via USB cd drive the OS can see the hdd but bios still does not, I've reset bios to factory default with no change. I have now replaced the motherboard and am still getting the same issue. I tried to put old hdd in with new m/b and the bios can see it but it says that it's faulty and to replace it. Can anyone please help I don't no what else to do?

I have my drive settings to AHCI and SATA mode. The drives on my system don't show up in the IDE section since I'm using AHCI. IF your settings are the same the drives won't show there, but will find them in the Boot Drives section, etc.

Have tried that?

No have not tried that but how would I change the settings?

Sorry for the delayed response, been working a lot lately.

I finally realized you have netbook... settings may be different with those compared to desktop units.

Did you realize that there are NO DRIVERS for Windows 7 for your Netbook according to HP's website for the model you have?

There is a BIOS update for the netbook from May of 2010, that may help. But not a guarantee.

Try using the Windows 7 install method from a USB Flash thumb drive instead of from the USB DVD drive that may help also.

Remember that netbooks are VERY limited in their hardware, etc., so the only version of Windows 7 that is recommended is the Windows 7 Starter edition, the others won't work from what I understand, plus it's a 32-bit version, there is no 64-bit Starter version.

I also tried to load xp on the hard drive but same issue. It was the bios not seeing the hard drive that confused me. Can you think of any other issue that it could be, with all new parts I'm stumped with what the problem is. Thanks for your help.