Hard Drive not recognized

Ok, I am not too sure what happened to my hard drive. I had gone downstairs to help my parents out with there computer, and when I returned, I had a black screen with the sentence, "Press F1 to retry boot or F2 to enter setup". It turns out that for some reason, my hard drive is not being recognized anymore by the BIOS and it won't boot. I tried automatically finding my HArd Drive in BIOS, but it says nothing is found. I hear that there is a virus that can prevent the hard drive from being found. I cannot run FDISK, Windows setup, or just plain Format because it says a hard disk was not found. Can somebody please help me figure out what the probem is, because I am realy not in the mood to buy a new hard drive. Thanks for all your help.

 

Download a bootdisk from here

that will get you to an A:\ prompt for commands.


Probalby wont help much until you get the bios to find your hd.

open up your case, blow the dust out of it and reseat all your HD cables(power and ide) then reboot.

 

I've already tried that, and it did not work. Is there any way I can clean it out and start fresh without accessing it through a computer's MS-DOS mainframe?