dell laptop not recognizing the primary hard drive

[chinks]

My dad was playing some games on my laptop and he got a blue screen saying "..... need to shut down to prevent more damage ..." he not entirely sure what the message was . he shut down the laptop. what he was doing was basically playing solitaire.
after that when i turned on the laptop , the bios loaded ok .. and then i got a message saying primay hard drive not found.. press f1 to retry and f2 to enter setup. I tried to change the sequence of boot up drives but still nothing happned.
The disk that is there currently is almost full and i was considering a replacement with a bigger one.. and this happened...

I opened up the laptop and then pressed all connection of the hard disk etc.. and turned on.. but again no help.

Any suggestions please...
The is the second that went dead with in a week for me... is this a bad time of the year to work on laptops ??? totally crippled with both the laptops out of action...
Help need please...

[goldeagle2005]

Try running the 32 Bit Dell diagnostics. When you power on the system and see the Dell logo, press F12 to get to the One Time Boot Menu. Once there, select the last option that says "Boot to Utility Partition". When you do this, the Dell Diagnostics will launch with 4 options: Express Test, Extended Test, Custom Test and Symptom Tree". Select the third option that says Custom Test. In the next window, select the "Hard Drive" option and click on Run Test. If this test reports any errors, contact Dell and they'll be able to help you from there.