Good Morning,

I have a Packard Bell K5266 Easynote Laptop, and I was happily going about my daily housekeeping on the PC when it froze. I tried the CTL-ALT-DEL to close it down however no response, so I forced it to close down by holding the on/off button waited and re-booted the system.

When it re-loaded a blue screen came up giving me the option to load from CD, Hard Drive, or Floppy. I don't have a floppy drive, so I tried HD, and just returned to the same screen. I then thought I would try the CD and load from the XP disk, it started through the setup and said it was installing Windows as soon as it had finished loading the files, it advised me that no hard drive was detected.

I even tried the Recovery Disk which came with the PC for situations like this and advised me no hard disk.

I went into the BIOS and no hard drive was found. Does this mean my hard drive is knackered and I need a new one??!

Your help would be appreciated, as the girlfriend is getting anxious as she wishes to book a holiday - mind you a bit of a god send as it is currently saving me money!!! :-)

Sounds like a dead drive or the connection failed. Packard Bell has a trouble shooter if you register on-line:

http://support.packardbell.com/uk/it...&pn=P920400301

Perhaps they will have options to diagnose.