I have an older dell and it won't boot. as soon as the network boot screen appears it goes to a sceen that says press F1 to retry boot, Press F2 for utility setup when I go to the utility setup it says there is no hard disk drive installed...The dell was working fine about 1 hour prior and when it was turned on after booting a blue screen appeared saying something about memory dump I believe. it restarted and now the thing won't boot at all

"saying something about memory dump I believe"

the most important part of troubleshooting you problem was all the numbers and error message on the bsod ,not the memory dump.
you harddrive may have died if the bios no longer sees it ,

thank you so much I realized this soon after I posted this thread!!! thank you for responding so quickly!!! I'm glad to know others acutally give useful advice and information on this site. Apologies for not taking the post down after I found the error. Thanks again!!!