My cousin asked me to look at his 4 year old Dell Inspiron 1100 notebook, because he was frequently receiving the blue screen of death. After finally getting it to boot up in safe mode and getting his files off-loaded to my primary desktop, I decided to reformat and reinstall XP. All was going well until about half way through the installation and then I got the dreaded message:

"Primary Hard Disk Drive 0 Not Found. No Bootable Devices -- strike F1 to Retry Boot or F2 for Setup Utility". At this point, the hard drive also started making a terrible clicking noise. Since I had his files saved off, I decided to get a new hard drive for it, so went out and got a new 60 gig drive. Put it in and got the same message! So I thought maybe I needed to flash the BIOS, which I did, but afterwards, same message. It won't let me load XP because it still doesn't think there's a hard drive present. Obviously, I think there's more to this than a bad hard drive, since the old drive and a brand new drive are returning the same message. Could it be something with the controller/mobo? Could it be something with the caddy?

I can't even run WD's diagnostic's or lifeguard utility on it because it doesn't even recognize the HD.

Frustrated in PA. Help?

Thanks, Dave