Question for you guys, first time posting here. A co-worker's box at home is an HP 530J, she's running Win XP. This morning (she's telecommuting today), she started it up, and it did not boot from the hard drive. The screen showed "Searching for floppy. Not found. Searching for CD. Not found." and then a msg referring to BIOS (She couldn't say exactly what this msg was). Since it couldn't find the hard drive apparently, does this mean it may be fried? Any ideas, please either post here or email aschuetz@pgama.com. Thanks for any help. Alex.

Possible. See if the harddrive activity light comes on or flickers. Mechanical devices do have their problems. My HDD started going out after 1yr from new. Or maybe no power from Power Supply to power HDD. How PC Power Supplies Work

yes it sounds like the hard drive has crashed. hopefully she had a backup of any important files. if not, there is a small chance that they can be recovered.

Redetect the drives in the bios. Also, check to see if the bios cmos battery needs to be replaced.

A friend of mine had kind of the same HD problem. There is this trick that he tried and it gave him 1 complete boot which allowed him to backup som files. Take the HD out, put it in the freezer over night, reinstall it, then try to boot your machine... I know that this sounds crazy but, you don't have anything to loose. If it works, GREAT... If it doesn't...Oh well! Paul