This is the error message on my daughter's dell laptop, windows xp
Primary hard disk not found. Fixed optical drive not found. No bootable devices. Strike f1 ot retry to beboot, f2 for the set up utility.

That's bad...

Try to go into the bios and see if the bios recognizes any of the drives. Look for the Dell splash screen when the laptop starts up. Look for the option to go into the setup. Usually something like del key or f1 or f2 or esc will get you into the bios. If your bios isn't recognizing the disk drives then you may be looking at a bad motherboard.