i have a hp pavilion dv7 laptop which was working perfectly ..but yesterday when i restarted my laptop it does not boot and says hard disk not detected ... I read somewhere that changing disk controller setting from AHCI to IDE might work but my laptop run on INSYDEH2O bios which has no such option ...i cannot update my bios as hp site offer bios with winflash which runs on windows . i have an important presentation to submit by sunday which is on my hard disk .. im running vista -64bit PLEASE HELP .!!!!
Ok dude don't panic lol... Since you have a presentation grab a copy of Ubuntu and put the hard drive into a external enclosure and put it on the your flash drive. After that start checking in the Bios and pull the hard drive out and see if that works...
Also check the cables for your harddrive. Like the power cable and the link cable on both your motherboard and harddrive. I would bet that most likely one of them came loose dude. This has happened to me many times. One way to make sure though is to insert and boot the install disk for either vista or win7 and when it comes to the hdd location see if your harddrive is appearing in that list. If not then there is something wrong like a cable or transfer error. If is is appearing then it is a problem in vista itself or something like that. I hope this clears stuff up for you though.
If this is an IDE drive, make sure that the hard drive is on the END of ribbon cable (not the middle connector) and make sure that the drive is jumpered as MASTER. If there is another component (like DVD burner, perhaps) on the same ribbon cable, make sure that is jumpered as SLAVE. If the above doesn't work, and the hard drive is IDE, try this...make sure that the hard drive is alone on the end connecter of an IDE ribbon cable, and that there is NO jumper installed on it. Again if IDE and both of the above doesn't work...try removing the battery from the motherboard and move the little jumper beside it to CLEAR_CMOS setting for about 30 seconds. Just remember to put the jumper back in the normal position and reinstall the battery. Again if IDE, do you have another IDE cable you could try? If it's SATA, you will need to load SCSI drivers (even though the drive isn't SCSI) for Windows install CD-Rom to be able to access the SATA hard drive. While windows CD is booting, it will give you a prompt, something like "press f5 to load third-party scsi drivers", follow the prompt. The SATA drivers will be on a floppy disk that came with the motherboard. If they didn't come with the motherboard, you will need to download them from the manufacturer of the motherboard.