Primary hard disc drive faliure

I am having a problem where my computer will randomly attempt to reboot itself, fail and go to a black screen with the following error:

SATA primary hard disc drive 0 failure
Strike F1 key to continue
F2 to run setup utility

When the F! key is hit I get the following response:

No boot device available

I have windows XP on a Del computer and have made no new software or other updates


Please help

Thanks,
Nate

What kind of drive do you have?

Here is what I suggest. Open my computer, open C drive and click on properties. Go to tools, and go thru error checking and tick on the two boxes to fix sectors and whatnot.
Then if your hard drive is a Western Digital or Seagate, go to their website and look for a diagnostic tool you can run on your drive.
Your drive may be failing, some fail in a short time, some fail after years.
Let us know how this turns out.

Oh, the Hard drive websites have a free disk cloning program, try to take advantage of that to copy your whole hard drive over to a new drive including programs and files/folders.
However if you have the Dell restore CD, it may be a time to do a clean install. Google for how to do it if youre unfamiliar.

To Cryptodan: Not sure how to check for the kind of drive. Can you instruct?

You can go into the BIOS and check under the HDD Options. For Dells you can enter the BIOS by hitting F2. Also do you have the service tag for this computer?

Thanks rosiesdad. I'll try it

@rosiesdad
It's his primary HD that fails. So how would he be able to do what you've suggested?

@Nate B
1. If you can get hold of a Linux based LiveCD like Knoppix, you could boot off the CD and check the status of your hard disk.

2. By type of drive, he wants to know if it's a SATA or IDE drive? The type of cables used, should give you an idea.

EDIT:

3. As per cryptodan's suggestion, you could check to see if your HD is listed in the BIOS.
If it is, then your computer is able to detect the hard disk but unable to read the data.

Edited by ReviverSoft, 11 June 2010 - 05:37 PM.