Hard drive is not detected

[Ato]

Hi
I found your forum while searching for answers for my problem and it seems that your forum is a good place to ask for technical help.
I am having trouble with a laptop that is not showing the hard drive at all, and I am not sure whether it is a dead drive or it might be of other reasons.
It is a HP Pavilion with intel i3, the HDD has 640gb with Windows 7 OEM. It belongs to a friend and she has been using it for normal tasks, no gaming or entertainment, just causual usage. It one day couldn't run as it should and I thought a reinstall of Windows will solve the problem, but it seems that the disc is not recognized as it says under installation that there are no boot disc.

In the installation CD there is a "reapir your windows" button which I chose to look for its partitions, and from there I noticed that it only shows X:sources and no other partition such as c: and also there are only 30 Mb used and 39 Mb free space.

My question is, do you think the drive is dead or could it be other issues with this laptop?

 

[samuria]

Welcome to the forum. First check inthe bios if it can see it if not its dead then just check the hard drive is in properley it can sometimes shake a bit loose

 

[Ato]

I did check in bios it is not detected and I have also removed the disc and reassembled it again but it didn't help.
Do you suggest there are no other failures except replacing a new one will help?

After setting a new hard drive,is it necessary to format and partition it before installing the Windows 7?

 

[samuria]

Replace the drive no need to create partition or format Windows will do it all for you get a ssd drive for a lot better speed a 480 gig only £53 now