Hi Brandon,

Welcome to the Dell Community Forum.

Turn on the system, at startup or at Dell logo tap F2 to open BIOS. In the BIOS screen, check what is listed for fixed HDD. If the HDD size is not listed, try reseating the HDD & check if it helps. Refer to the link below for the service manual.

http://bit.ly/1iFkWZz

Reply with your findings to proceed further.

Hello, I am having the exact same problem with the exact same model Dell, Inspiron 3542.  I am getting the same error message.

My BIOS screen shows the hard drive is still there.

What would you recommend I do next?

Hi, I have the same model and same problem but the hard drive has been reseated and it is still showing 0GB in the BIOS and Diagnostics still says it cannot find the hard drive. Mine froze while I was working and when I rebooted I got the message no hard drive  detected. My hard drive has a date of  14 April 2014 on it.

I told diagnostics to continue running and it found everything but the hard drive. 

Help! Thank you

The  hard drive is toast -- if the system is under warranty, call Dell and they'll replace it.  If it's not, you'll need a new 7 mm SATA notebook drive -- hard drive, hybrid drive or solid state drive.  You'll also need the recovery media you (hopefully) made when you received the system.  If you did not make that, you will need to call Dell to purchase a recovery flash drive for the system.

Hey, do you remember what did you do to fix this problem?