Can't boot up

My father was using his computer during a storm. There was a few electrical power interuptions (although there is a surge protector setup). He decided to shut the machine down after a bit. The next day he tried to boot his machine up and could not.

What comes up is a message in plain text that reads 'Hit F1 to retry hit F2 to enter system setup'.

I tinkered with it trying to solve the problem but could not. What I did notice was that if you hit F2 you ended up in BIOS and when you looked in the Hard Drive Management section, the hard drive was not shown.

The system is a Dell system. It is 2.6 ghrtz, 256meg of ddr ram with a 40 gig maxor IDE hard drive. Also, the system does not have a seperate Hard Drive Controller (seems to be built into the board).

The things I tried were...
* I tried setting it to 'Auto Detect' but it still would not show the drive.
* I took an old HD that I had which was the same type and put it in in place of the old drive and still had the same problem.
* I put a boot disk and an OS installation CD in the appropriate drives and tried to reboot and could not even get a dos prompt or a setup screen.

At this point I am thinking that I should get my father a replacment Motherboard and CPU but I was hoping that some of the wiser heads here might be able to suggest something I had not thought of.

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

 

the electric storm could damaged the mboard or the HD, anyway try configuring the bios again, unplug the HD, turn the pc see what happen, turn it off plug it again and watch if it recognize it, i had a similar problem but with an old laptop computer.