Help with no fixed disk error

Sounds like you may have gotten hit with a virus, or your hard disk has given up the ghost. If it just turned itself off, you may have had a short circuit. If it went through shutdown or just rebooted, but came back on by itself, suspect a virus.
Hardware things to check for:
If you were inside the box recently to upgrade something else, clean out the dust-bunnies, or what have you, verify that the IDE ribbon cable is securely connected on both ends. The colored stripe on the cable indicates that it should be connected to PIN1 on the HD and on the motherboard. Check the HD power connector is inserted well, too.

Does the HD indicator light up when you boot? Does it stay lit? How long before the "no disk" error? Any beeps from the speaker?

If you were the lucky recipient of the Michaelangello virus or something similar, it wipes out the Master Boot Record of your disk and that kills the disks abilitiy to boot and even be read. Check out the Symantec website for fixing it.

First of all, check the cables. Dont put the covers on and try booting your pc. If you dont hear a hissing sound or you dont feel your HD vibrating, then your HD-board could be toasted. If it's toasted, you BIOS will not be able to detect it and theonly way to solve your problem is to buy a new one. It is also possible that your Power Supply is insufficient. It usually happen when we add too much add-on cards and HD (assuming you got 2 HD). If this is the case, remove the other HD and try booting again. If it works, just upgrade your Power Supply to a higher wattage.

what sort of machine do you have and what operating system are you running? Does the BIOS auto detect your HDD or do you require drivers to install it? Is the drive IDE? Have you set the jumpers on the drive correctly? Are runng this new drive in tandem with the old one in a primary master and primary slave configuration? Is you cable installed the right way around and in the correct IDE socket on the motherboard?

Usually when your system has problems registering new hardware it is likely to be one of the following:
Incompatible hardware with current motherboard
incorrect instilation
Wrong drivers
Conflict with another existing device - (check jumper settings)
faulty hardware

Hope i have helped a little

cheers Adam Edgar - TAS Department Davidson High School, NSW Australia

Your harddisk maybe crash try to put linux operating system in the cd rom and boot it up. lets the linux operationg system (usually i'm using Linx mandrake) detect it. Linux will tell you which hardware is not operating. Install the operating system. Linux will detect the hard disk in the installing process if the hard disk crash it will not continue the installment. If the operating system detect that the hard disk is not detected try to buy a new one.