WinME error "No Fixed Disk Present"

[CrysAnn]

I resently received a used computer. It came with all of the system recovery disks. I had started up the computer too see if there was anything on it and there was nothing. So, I inserted the system recovery disk and turned off the computer, waited about 30 seconds ad turned it back on. I was sent directly to the recovery screen and just to make sure there was no viruses on the harddrive I clicked "format and recover." It went through it motions, then it suddenly said that the format failed, it was aborting it and beginning the recovery. Then about 20 minutes later it said "recovery failed: abort? Retry?"
I clicked retry and it just did the same thing.
I turned it off, with the recovery disk inside, to start it over and I get the blue screen that tells me no drive is present and I should run FDISK. Back in DOS, I type in the prompt FDISK and I get another error that says "No Fixed Disks Present"
What did I do? Did I accidentally erase all the partitions and now there's nothing to run off of? I am planning the update it to XP (it is XP ready), if I bought the full software would that create its own partitions if that is the problem?
Thanks in advance for any and all help.

~Crys

[pip22]

Even if there was no partition to boot from, FDISK should still run to create a partition for you, provided that the hard disk has not failed and is no longer usable. I suspect that is your problem --- the hard disk (assuming there is one inside the PC case!) has 'died' and you need to replace it with a new one.

[Tom]

The cost of drives has gone down considerably, but being what people call cheap, I always like to double check before putting coins on their eyes. Here are two more steps I'd suggest:
1 - The error could be corrupt system files. Go Here (http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm) and save the ME OEM file to your good pc. Click on the downloaded program to create a boot floppy. Load the floppy into the old pc and startup. Select 2. Start the computer without CD-ROM support. At the A:\> prompt type sys C: then hit enter. After the files transfer you can restart the pc. You should now be at the point where you wanted to start.
2 - If you still get the No Fixed Disks error, Here (http://www.seagate.com/support/seatools/) you can download a handy drive checking utility from Seagate - works on most drives. Again, use it to create a floppy to place in the problem pc.
There is cabling/power supply stuff that also could be culprit here, but I would try these two ideas first.

[CrysAnn]

Thanks for the help. I really hope that it isn't the hard drive. I'll check the links and let you know if it helped or not.