Hard drive not recognized

[Glittergirl]

I was listening to a streaming radio station on my Dell Inspiron 5100 laptop, on which I have XP Home Edition with SP3, and it just stopped and came up with a blue screen. Now when I try to boot up, it says it does not recognize my hard drive. I do a weekly backup so I am not concerned about losing anything since it is all on my backup disk, but I would like to be able to use my computer. Any idea what happened here? And how to fix it? I have AVG antivirus program installed which I update automatically and scan with weekly, as well as the Windows updates and a few antispyware programs, and nothing indicated that there was any problem prior to it dying. I have the Windows Firewall activated and I use a gateway modem/router provided by my ISP if that makes any difference. Any thoughts here? Thanks.

[pam123]

It sounds like your hard drive just died ( Quote from glc : There are two types of computer users, those who have had a hard drive failure and those who will have a hard drive failure. ) .

Is the laptop still under warranty and did you make recovery disks ?

edit : If it will post (boot) without the drive (Only pull the drive yourself if you've know what to do.) then it's the drive if it won't then the motherboard.

http://en.community.dell.com/forums/.../19402138.aspx

[glc]

Press F12 immediately after powering it on and see if you can boot it into diagnostics. If so, run them. If not, dig out the Dell Resource CD that came with the laptop and boot to that, you can run diagnostics from that.

[Glittergirl]

Ah, didn't even know there was a diagnostic CD for this computer (purchased it used) but prevailed upon the person I bought it from and was able to get the CD. Both that and being able to boot without the drive, as Pam suggested, are telling me to go buy a new hard drive. Oh well, cheaper than a new computer and now I have learned what a computer does when the hard drive dies. Thank you both for all the information and your very quick responses.