Primary hard disk drive

[trippgirl]

My Laptop is not wanting to boot up. When I turn it on it says "primary hard disk drive not found, fixed optical drive not found. Under that it says No bootable devices. I have no clue what the problem is. I am running windows XP home edition. Please help!!!!

[GX1_Man]

Do we get any clues about the machine. how old it is, what happened prior to this, etc.? See below.

Go into the BIOS/setup and see if the drives are recognized there. It may be a failure of the devices (both at the same time from mechanical causes is unlikely) or the IDE controller and therefore the motherboard.

Without more info we are just guessing, but it sounds like a trip to the shop is next.  

[trippgirl]

It is a Dell Latitude C800. It was working fine and then a screen came up that said begin physical memory dump and the computer shut down. I tried to reinstall windows thinking that might fix the problem but it gave me the same memory dump screen. So now all I get is the Primary hard disk drive not found screen. I hope this info helps.....

[GX1_Man]

Did you dislodge the hard drive by picking it up by the drive holder by chance? Sometimes those can be pulled out just enough to cause this symptom.

You can try pushing it back in and rebooting. Here's a picture.

http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/latc800/en/ug/r_r.htm#replacing_a_primary_hard_drive


Here are some general error messages:

http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/latc800/en/ug/error.htm

And here's the manual for that system:

http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/latc800/en/ug/index.htm