"No bootable devices strike F1 to retry boot, F2 for setup utility"

I have an old Dell Latitude C610 Laptop, Pentium III, that I got from a friend who's son got some wicked virus on it and the computer was pretty much useless. It would boot and load windows but once it finished loading, it would freeze, wouldn't let me run a virus scan, nothing.

To make a long story short, I used a utility on my 'Ultimate Boot CD" to wipe the drive clean. Oh, my friend didn't have the restore disk either. Now I get this message "No boot sector on hard disk - No bootable devices - strike F1 to retry boot, F2 for setup utility" I have a Windows XP disk that I tried using to reinstall the OS but kept getting the same message. I set the bios so the CD Rom would boot first, did no good. My UBCD boots just fine so, it is not a bad HD. The laptop doesn't have a floppy drive either so, I can't make boot floppies.

Help

Hi

did you buy any chance remove the drive from the laptop at all... ?

the c610 has a little blade adaptor that changes the standard IDE pins into a flat set of pins, they sometimes dont sit right or the drive isnt snugly in the drive bay....

take it out and reinsert it,,on boot up go into the BIOS (F2 at boot) and check the drive shows, if it doesnt then the drive has died and needs to be replaced.

regards

ididmyc600