Dell Laptop: Primary hard disk drive 0 not found

100 GB hard drive worked well. One day - it stopped.
"Primary hard disk drive 0 not found
No bootable devices..."

No disks in BIOS are shown now

Same story couple months before that was with another 80GB harddisk.
Several files on drive C (FAT) though were corrupted (CHKDSK corrected that)


"Fun" is:
1) Harddisk works fine if placed into desktop PC, no problems with any diagnostics
2) laptop works fine with small size old 4 GB harddrive

Harddrive connector problem???? BIOS problem with nonstandard size harddisks (DELL sold this notebook only with 60 GB max). Old not supported firmware ?

Dell Customer Support after several diagnoistics by phone only suggested to buy ane more disk and check. But I afraid that most probably it will not work

Somethig similar was here (but guy does not respond)
http://www.experts-exchange.com/Operating_Systems/Q_21865448.html