Hard Drive Not Detected, Inspiron 17 3721, WIndows 8

Hello Dell tech support.

My name is Ted and I am not very tech savvy. This is my first post on a tech forum so any help is greatly appreciated.

I have a Dell inspiron 17 3721 running windows 8 and it has major issues. It will boot up but after maybe one minute of use it freezes and needs to be restarted. Multiple errors were seen at this time such as:

Logon Ul.exe - Application error 0x00000001043c42c8. The required data was not put into memory because of an I/O error status of 0xc000000e .... and Virtual Drive.exe Error .... other errors also occurred but flashed by too quickly to see

I tried running a system refresh from the recovery window but it did not work. I then tried to reinstall windows but that did not work either. I then ran a pre boot system assessment which it says it has passed despite the fact that it failed one of the tests with "hard drive not installed". I also did an f2 and looked at the bios utility and it says " HDD not detected. This sounds pretty bad to me, like maybe a failed hard drive? This is really disappointing as the laptop is only 4 months old. Is it covered by warrantee?

Any help would be greatly appreciated

Thank you very much in advance

Ted