I would make sure first that it still comes up (shows up) in the Bios
(usually DEL or F1 on boot gets in). If your Battery went dead and the
drives are not set to be auto-detected in the BIOS, then it may not show
up or register as a drive on boot.

If the BIOS sees it and it still comes up as "No hard disk found", then
I would see about getting access to another PC and downloading the
manufacturers (Western Digital, Seagate/Maxtor, etc...) utilities
program. These usually can detect a drive and test them from a floppy
disk or CD (as long as the PC allows you to boot from a CD drive). Run
that and see if it can repair or detect the drive.

If that doesn't work, then it may be gone (unfortunately). Hope that helps.

RJC

Deanna wrote:
>
> My computer was on and i was away from it and i guess it tried to reboot
> itself which has never happened before.
>
> It then said "not a system disk" so i put in my XP System Recovery disk in
> to try and just get windows going again....and pressed a key. It then said
> " No hard disk found"
>
> Does this mean my hard drive is fried? Not sure what caused it but it is an
> older computer. Is there any way to save it?
>
> Thanks for any help