Finally happened to me: Laptop disk dead

Well, it finally happened to me.

My wife has a Dell Inspiron 2200 laptop purchased in September 2005. I was using it his morning and noticed that the disk was making clicking sounds. After a while, I turned the computer off and then back on.

I got an error screen that said "No bootable devices - Strike F1 to retry boot."
I did that and got the same message.

I pressed F2 and looked at the setup info. Device Info said "Primary Hard Drive: None !!"

This laptop has worked fine until now. I am assuming that the disk drive must be bad. And maybe Windows detected it and disconnected it from the BIOS - is that possible?

In 20 years of computing, I have read about lots of disk failures but it has never happened to me.

SOOO, what’s the fastest, cheapest, and easiest way to fix the problem?
Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Can I replace the disk myself? If so, is Dell the best or only source of a replacement?

And of course, I never kept all the instructions that people have given about what to do when your disk drive crashes. So pointers to those instructions would be appreciated too.

Thanks in advance !!

 

About 3 -4 months ago a workmate of my brother had the exact same thing happen with his Dell Inspiron Laptop. Of course my brother volunteered me to have a look at it so I went round their work that same afternoon and used various bootable CD tools and apps to see if any of them could access the hard drive. All reported no hard drive connected and after several attempts I concluded that the hard drive must have indeed died. It was a company laptop so I was not going to mess with it and so left it at that. The next day my brother informed me that the laptop was working again and seem fine. It is still working now as if nothing had happened. Who knows.... maybe a loose connection that remade contact, or the cool down overnight, or the ghost in the machine.

 

Thanks, Steve, for the encouragement.

Installing the new hard drive was easier than I thought. And Windows installed OK.

But now when I go to the Device Manager, there is a yellow question mark in front of Ethernet Controller, Multimedia Audio Controller, Network Controller, PCI Modem, Video Controller, and Video Controller (VGA compatible). Apparently, I need drivers for these devices. Plus the computer doesn’t recognize my DSL connection so I can’t connect to the Internet. But when I put in the Windows "Drivers and Utilities" CD, the Device Manager doesn’t find the drivers for these devices.

Do you have any idea what I need to do to (presumably) get the Ethernet Controller and Network Controller working so I can connect to the internet?

Thanks again for any suggestions. I’m sure the answer is simple, but I don’t know what it is.