If your Hard Disk Drive (HDD) is not found and assuming that this is also your boot disk for starting the laptop, then you have several possible causes:
1. The HDD has failed / died / become non-operational and will need to be replaced and your operating system reloaded or restored from a backup if you have one.
2. The computer BIOS has lost the configuration for the HDD and doesn't recognise it as a valid boot device. In this case, you would need to go into the BIOS settings and check to see what HDD devices are beig detected, then look at the Boot options within the settings and ensure that the HDD is selected as the main boot device.
Note: It is normal to have other removable devices set ahead of the HDD such as CD / Diskette or USB devices.
3. The HDD boot sector has become corrupted and the computer no longer recognises the disk as a valid boot medium. You would need to repair the HDD is this is possible using an alternative boot media such as the
Hiren's Boot CD which you would need to download as an ISO CD image then burn on to a blank CD disc, then boot from. The DOS programs on the Hiren's CD provide a very good HDD repair tool called HDAT2.
An alternative approach would be to remove the HDD from the laptop and connect it as a slave in a different computer and then perform any repair activities from that system.
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