Hardware

If you go into BIOS, can the PC see the drive (reports drive type/capacity) or not?

Does drive spin-up and reset?

Does drive spin-up and go click-click, click-click? (click of death).

I will try that shortly and report back with some more information....I can confirm that the drive is not having a click of death issue

Is only one sign that the HDD is faulty and gone to Silicon Heaven and not something to be relied upon as a Definitive sign of a dead HDD.

Most of the time the Drive just dies and shorts out the Chanel that it is connected to preventing thee system from accessing anything at all.

You description above tends to point to a dead HDD which is either drawing too much power or has a Dead Short. The way to test this is to remove the HDD and with a Boot Disc in the Optical Drive see if you can freely access the Boot Disc.

Of course a dead giveaway is the fact that no HDD is showing in the BIOS, but often you are unable to access the BIOS or anything more than the POST Screen when you have a dead HDD.

Col

Unlikely but I have seen it happen. there should be power and data connections to the hard disk

I can't even get into the BIOS on this computer...I did pull the drive out and ran diagnostics on it and its comming up with no errors...BIOS issue? I did get something like "Ctrl + n to ___ raid" then pops up with "Detecting storage devices." then this pops up very quickly " No disk reserved for RAID us, Raid disabled"...thus it resorts back to "Please insert bootable media into device and or reboot" or something like that. Once again, I can't even get into the bios on this computer.

Perhaps pulling the drive and try booting with a usb bios flash update?
I am having problems finding a flash restore for this computer as-well, seems AMD and HP don't have one, which I find odd or an update for that matter.

disconnected drive, wont boot with my boot disc and when trying to get into the BIOS it freezes...also on another instance it just hangs at the HP splash screen.

reset the cmos maybe?
memory issue? I'd really hate to have to pull and test each module with boots to find the culprit if thats the case

If hitting f1 or f10 immediately upon seeing the HP screen does not go into BIOS means that you may have a bad/failed chipset on the motherboard.

FROM HP:

Turn off the computer and wait five seconds.
Turn on the computer and immediately press the F10 key repeatedly until a BIOS Setup screen opens.
If nothing happens, press the F1 key repeatedly.

Your friend's HP probably has a Pegatron m2n78-la motherboard. Any chance it's still under warranty?

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&taskId=120&prodSeriesId=3942799&prodTypeId=12454&objectID=c01817974


I would pull their main hard disk and use a SATA connector kit to pull off their data to a USB drive, as someone's going to want to service this unit, and your friend will most likely lose their data. This is much easier under Vista/Windows7 because all of your data files are in C:\USERS folder and you can just copy that folder onto a portable drive. Everything else will be OS or program related, and it's pointless to try and recover those items.

Rick in Sacramento

UBUNTU 11 can be booted from a flash drive. I would make one and try booting the unit from that with the HD disconnected.

http://blog.sudobits.com/2011/09/11/how-to-install-ubuntu-11-10-from-usb-drive-or-cd/

If that doesn't work work,its your motherboard.