When trying to boot, hard drive not found

[Guest]

While booting, my Dell Inspiron 8200 using xp professional gives message "primary hard disk drive not found", "fixed optical drive not found" and "no bootable devices".
Happened when i arrived home to a blue screen saying something about a fatal error and then it said something about preparing to dump memory. Since then I can't boot up and only get messages indicated above. Anyone seen this problem? Could it be a virus?

 

[D.Currie]

While booting, my Dell Inspiron 8200 using xp professional gives message

"primary hard disk drive not found", "fixed optical drive not found" and "no
bootable devices".

Happened when i arrived home to a blue screen saying something about a

fatal error and then it said something about preparing to dump memory. Since
then I can't boot up and only get messages indicated above. Anyone seen this
problem? Could it be a virus?

Sounds like a hardware problem. Or perhaps the bios got reset to default.
Can you boot from a floppy?

 

[Guest]

Thanks D. Currie, since I can't bootup to get any use of hard disk, I can't use floppy. I am not literate enough to understand about the bios being reset to default. Without being able to use hard drive, how do i change bios and what would i change bios to if other than default. adraw

 

[D.Currie]

You're probably best off finding someone who can help you there, or taking
it somewhere for repair. Every bios is different, so there's no way to tell
you what should be there.

Thanks D. Currie, since I can't bootup to get any use of hard disk, I

can't use floppy. I am not literate enough to understand about the bios
being reset to default. Without being able to use hard drive, how do i
change bios and what would i change bios to if other than default. adraw

 

[Guest]

Thanks D. Currie for your efforts to help. I have discovered that the Dell Inspiron 8200 has a long history of hard disk drive failures. There seem to be many Dell customers who are unhappy because of this same problem. It looks like I am screwed.