Dell "no operating system found

my wife just bought a Dell inspiron 1210 mini at a local pawn shop. Everything seemed to be great until today. She went to start up and it now says

Intel UNDI,PXE-2.1 (build 082)
Copyright (c)1997-2000 Intel Corp
for realtek RTL8101E/8102E PCI-E Ethernet Controller v1.o8 (080408)
CLIENT MAC ADDR: 00 24 E8 C5 DF 4B GUID: 44454C4C-5300-1056-8054-C6C04F4C4B31
PXE-E53: no boot file received
PXE-MOF: Exiting PXE ROM
Operating System not found

My wife and I do not have the money to fix this, we are both in internet college, we both have to post in classes tonight!! We have about 10,000 dollars in student loans riding on this if anyone can help...were broke students and cant afford to take this to get repaired and I am sure the pawn shop will not help with a new system.....Can anyone pleaase help up!!! Please !!!

 

It appears that you may have a problem with the hard drive in the system. I suggest you look up the manual on line, remove the drive and replace it to make sure none of the connectors are loose.

 

I have run into something similar before when the 30 day activation period had expired before being activated.

 

This indicates that the computer is trying to boot from a network drive rather than the hd in the computer itself.
Get into the BIOS (I'm not positive what key this might be but try F12) and be sure the computer is set to boot from the internal hd rather than a networked drive.

 

Dells are normally F2.
Anyway, the laptop is set to boot from network before HDD, but it is trying the HDD otherwise it would not say "Operating System not found"

I have just looked at the Dell site and the first BIOS made (A01) was 21/10/2008 indicating that your system is quite new but I would not rule out hard drive failure.

I recommend you download and burn to CD this free program, and run a hard drive test from it to see if your hard drive is OK: http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/