Good evening and before I start, thanks to anyone who can help. I have been asked to look at my fathers Dimension E520 PC which has just developed a start up problem. When I start the PC after the initial Dell screen I get the following text. 

Serial ATA AHCI Bios, Version iSrc 1.02.23 11212006

Copyright (c) 2003 - 2006 Intel corporation

Controller Bus #00, Device#IF, Function#02: 02 ports, 01 devices

Port-00:Hard Dsk, Samsung HD080HJ/P

(This drive is controlled by the raid bios)

Port 01: No Device detected

AHCI Bios not installed

Intel (r) matrix storage manager option ROM V6.0.0.1022 ICH8R

Copyright (c) 2003-06 Intel corporation all rights reserved

Drive 1 not found: Serial ATA, SATA-1

floppy diskette seek failure

Strike the F1 key to continue, F2 to run the setup utility.

When I press the F1 key I get the following message

Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt

\windows\system32\config\system

you can attempt to repair the file by starting windows setup using the original setup cd-rom

select 'r' at the first screen to start repair.

When I try and do this nothing happens and the cd doesn't start or run to permit me to do anything.

I am going to try and get an external caddy to attempt to recover his pictures but in the meantime how do I get the pc into safemode? as the message above says drive 1 not found : serial ata, sata-1 is it possible that the hdd has given up?

Any help you can give is very much appreciated as he just wants to be able to recover the data first and then if I have to I will reformat the drive and do a complete install. Any hints on this for a dell would also be appreciated asI've read that they can be awkward???