I found that this actually seems to be a reoccuring problem with Dells on here...

I have a Dell, it's pretty new, a little less than 4 months old, (but about 3 weeks past its warrenty expiration, go fig) it was running fine until about a week ago when I turned it on and there was a double beep that usually doesn't happen, followed by the "Primary drive 0 not found, yadda yadda press F1 to continue, F2 for setup" bit appeared. Pressing F1 didn't do much more than make the computer beep at me and tell me to press F1 again, so I went into setup.

I went into boot sequence and was given two checkmarked options of "Boot from Hard disk (not specified) and Boot from CD". I have a feeling I should be able to change that not specified to my primary drive but I've yet to see a way to go about doing that. Anyways, I've found that just changing any setting then changing it back to what it originally was (ie.e changing auto to off and back to auto, or un checking then rechecking one of the options) then hitting esc and saving the changes causes it to boot up fine and run properly until the next time it decides not to boot properly (about every other time I try to turn it on). I can only hope the drive is not dying since it's so new and seems to run fine once it's been pointlessly messed with.

Any suggestions or info would be very welcomed, thanks.

it is dieing. i recomend never getting anything less than a 3 yr warrenty with any computer purchased. back to your problem though, your hd is dieing, and it should be replaced.

btw, what kindof dell did you get? if it was one of the uber cheap ones with 90days warrenty, they can only make them that cheap becasue most of the parts in them are referbished (ie used), so dont go thinking it is a competly new computer, its just more or less a new case.

my trust in Dell is quickly waning. a friend of mine suggested it may be a faulty motherboard not saving the bios properly, but no one seems quite sure.

as for the type it was a Dimension B110, so yea, on the lighter end of things. sort of drives me nuts because i had a dell before this that ran fine for 5 years with way less memory and hd space.

Sounds to me like a classic case of a dead CMOS battery.

It very well could be. However, what would deterimine that is if you were asked to put in the date and time everytime your computer is booted. Is this the case with your dell?