H61M "Can't find any devices"

[longfeltwant]

Hello. I am a bit of a noob with a frustrating problem. I recently built a computer with help from friends, and now I can't get it to... well, to do much of anything.

* H61M U3S3 ASRock motherboard
* Appropriate Intel chip
* solid state OS drive
* spinning data drive
* external USB optical drive

(You can tell I'm not a spec nerd or else I'd list out all the product specs.) Anyway, we got this thing running with Ubuntu + XBMC and I was having fun. Eventually I started poking at the fstab file and managed to mess that up, and while I was trying to fix that, during one of the reboots, I received the following error message. At first I thought I'd caused the problem by frobbing fstab, but now I'm not so sure.

Asmedia 106X SATA Controller Ver 0.90 IDE Mode
S.M.A.R.T. Supported
Using PCIE Gen 2
Can't find any device.

The problem here is that I can't even boot into the BIOS to debug the issue or to wipe-and-reinstall my operating system. I have tried

* Holding down F2, or F1, or F10, or F12 at startup makes no difference. I never see a message offering to drop into the BIOS, nor does holding down any key change the message which appears.

* Booting from a CD is unsuccessful. It sort of spins up for a bit, seems to start reading the disc, then stops.

* Jumping the CMOS pins didn't change anything. Same message, no difference. I also tried removing the motherboard battery and then putting it back. No difference.

* I disconnected the two drives. Same message.

* The motherboard does seem to POST. I don't always hear it beep, but sometimes I do.

When I've searched the web for "Can't find any device", it seems that this is a "normal" error message indicating lack of bootable drives. That sounds about right, but then why can't I get into the BIOS? What else could I try? If I could get to the BIOS, or start from a CD, then I could probably fix my problem.

[longfeltwant]

Having figuratively smashed my forehead against the motherboard for the last day, I can summarize this problem more succinctly:

When I power on my computer, I see the message

Asmedia 106X SATA Controller Ver 0.90 IDE Mode
S.M.A.R.T. Supported
Using PCIE Gen 2
Can't find any device.

* The motherboard gets to that point, implying that it POSTs
* It will not print any messages regarding the BIOS
* It will it enter BIOS under any keystroke (F2, DEL, others)
* Once it showed "B4" in the lower-right corner and flickered to "99" before the error message appeared

Thus the question is, what kind of problem could cause the motherboard to print that message, yet refuse further input, and refuse access to the BIOS? Could there be any conclusion other than bad motherboard?

[prsc]

Try unplugging your hard drive and booting with only the CD drive with your OS disc during the boot. Before you do boot check that all cables and what not are securely installed and plugged in, reseat your CPU and memory just to be safe. If that doesn't do anything, try booting up with just the hard drive. The next option would be to switch out the hard drive if you have a spare one handy.

If you have an on board gfx card then remove your other gfx card from the PCI express slot, if the display is defunct to the PCI express then put it back in.

I'm no expert but the above is what I'd do to try and troubleshoot the problem, hope it does something!