Need to reformat hard drive

I have to reformat the hard drive of my Dell desktop. I believe there is a virus on the computer because none of the programs work, and the blue screen of death always pops up. I was going to try to fix the problem, but I can not run programs long enough to clean the system...I always get some type of error message. I decided to reformat the hard drive, but every time I load the OP disk it displays a message saying it can not go further because it does not detect a hard drive. I went into the BIOS, and it also says there is no hard drive installed?! I tried to boot from the OP disk again, but now my computer won't even do that...the cd rom reads the disk, but nothing happens. What can I do to resolve the issue so I can reformat the hard drive?

 

There is an identical thread by the same member in the Hardware forum.
http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=163655

Will a forum moderator please close this thread as help has already been started on the thread linked to above. Lets keep this thread in the Hardware forum instead of 2 different places.
Thanks.