Check the BIOS settings. In particular, the boot sequance.
If the floppy appears there, disable it.
If you then can't boot, it point to some problem with your hard drive.
It may just be a corrupted or missing essential file needed to boot (bening), a corrupted file system (serious), or a dead drive (VERY bad)
Disconnect the computer.
Make sure the drive is properly connected. Check both the power and the data cable: ATA ribon or SATA cable.
If it's correctly connected, disconnect it, install a new drive, replug the computer and do a fresh install of your OS on it.
Unplug the computer again.
Reconnect your original drive and power up.
Check if you can access file on the old drive.
If you can, all your files are fine and you now have two disks to store your data. You had a missing or corrupted system file.
If you can't, it means that:
1 - The root directory is corrupt. You can recover all content with some data recovery programm, some of whitch are free or low cost.
In that case, you MUST make sertain that there is NOTHING writen to that drive and that you don't do ANYTHING that could modify anything on the drive.
That drive is very probably good. It's possible that something or some event forced the writing of bad data to the wrong place.
2 - The drive is dead or seriously ill. All data are lost or to be considered lost, or it will be VERY costly to recover them. Unless those data are worth a LOT (several $10000's) , the recovery cost will grossly outweight the value of your data.
Remove the drive and use it as a paper weight.
Electro, May 2011
