No Operating System installed..

[Balt]

Hi,

My roommate turned on his computer this morning and got this message while booting up. I'm thinking his hard drive probably died, as his BIOS is not detecting any hard drive at all. While using a bootable startup disk it creates a RAMdrive for C:

I tried:
1) Using the system recovery disk. No luck.
2) Using fdisk /mbr. No luck. It tells me there is no fixed drive.
3) Looking in the BIOS. No luck. Won't let me set a hard drive manually (I assume it auto-detects).


My question is this: Is there any possibility that this is just a very nasty virus? I thought if this were the case, fdisk /mbr might have at least let the drive be recognized. I'm pretty sure the hard drive is hosed, but I thought I would double-check with you guys before jumping to conclusions.

Thanks

Edit: I should probably mention that this is a laptop, and as such (since I have no experience with them) I haven't opened up his computer to check the connections.

 

[bozo1]

It's not a virus if the system BIOS can't even see the drive. Open the laptop and reseat the hard drive. If it still doesn't work, the drive is probably toast - slight chance it's the controller on the mobo but that rarely fails.

 

[Balt]

Thanks, that's what I had thought was probably the case. I guess I'll be opening up my first laptop soon.

Thanks for the help