[AngChron]

My computer freaked out, went to error screen, and told me it was dumping physical memory. I restarted it and it will not boot up. It's telling me primary hard disk srive 0 not found and there are no bootable devices. When I hit F1 to retry boot, it tries and then gives me the same message. I can press F2 for Setup Utility... What do I do to fix it and what the heck happened??!!!n I have a Dell Inspiron 8600.

[bmt626]

sounds like a hard drive issue try hooking the hard dirve up to a friends computer to see if you can access your files to back them up then re-load the os

[AngChron]

Thanks for the advice. I think I'm gonna wait for a master person to answer. I dont want to plug in my hard drive to a friend's computer if it's bad and possibly has a virus. I haven't had any probs with it until all of a sudden. And I was on the internet at the time...so I'm a little suspicious

[buddythedog]

With a notebook it can be a little more difficult to troubleshoot things. Press F2 and go into setup. If you look under IDE devices do you see your HD listed? Dell's usually come with a diagnostic CD. If you have one go into Setup (F2) again and make your CD drive the first CD device and put that CD in and boot up. Run the diagnostics. Make sure you are plugged in and not just running on the battery. If no CD post back.

[AngChron]

I'm trying the diagnostics CD. so far it's passed everything....but it's still running so I'll get back to ya

[Ziggy587]

First I would check the physical connection of the drive inside the computer. Then I would check the BIOS and make sure the drive is "on."

Sounds like a bad hard drive. Hope you have nothing special on it. This sounds similar to the time my friends hard drive was "failing." I tried the two things I just suggested and it still didn't boot. So then under the BIOS I selected "restore defualts." The drive booted up to Windows, then completely failed a day or two later. It was long enough for him to back up a few important files he needed.