No Hard Drive Found on Laptop

[all4it]

I have a Dell Latitude CPi that has not been used for a year, and now I need to use it, but after I had charged it for more than 24 hours, the only thing it will display is:"primary hard disk drive 0 not found,No bootable device(s) selected, strike F1 to retry boot, F2 for setup utility.

I have tried to select the option for the utility and the reboot but nothing happens.

Has the hard drive gone south on me or does someone know of another way I can access the system.

I tried to boot from the diskette drive but it still displays the above messages.

If I have to format the hard drive so be it, but I have to have this laptop ready to go by Tuesday morning, any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks
Roy

 

[mcall]

since you say getting msg even booting to floppy, make sure bios set to allow boot from floppy. First things to try before writing off HD is 1) reseat HD - instructions on dell web site on how to do this if you don't know. 2) boot floppy from msdos boot disk which has fdisk. Once at A: prompt type "fdisk /mbr". This last is real long shot but I've seen weirder things when I was at Dell. You may want to consider replacing backup battery. A bad backup battery can cause wierd things in Bios.