Anybody ever have this issue - Fast Boot causing problems with boot up...

I have an Inspiron 570 running the A06 BIOS with Win 7 Pro OS.  Started having an issue with boot up.  Started machine and the initial boot screen came up - the progress bar hung at about the half way point and the beeped and gave me the message Hard Drive Disk Failure press F1 or F2.  Chose F2 and went to setup - in set up I noticed that the hard drive was not acknowledged.  Of the four SATA slots only the CD-ROM was showing.  I made no changes but merely exited setup and the boot up completed and Windows came up.  I repeated this several times.  Used Dell's online diagnostics and the internal Pre-boot diagnostics.  All tests came back negative for any hard drive issues.  Discussed it with Dell Concierge Support for over an hour - they ran chkdsk (which I could have done if I had thought about it) - still no issues with the hard drive. They did several soft reboots (not from an actual powered off state) the issue seemed to resolve.  When I powered the machine down and booted - the issue returned.  So one of my internet searches had briefly/vaguely mentioned disabling anything in the BIOS that might affect the boot process - FAST BOOT came to mind.  So I disabled Fast Boot and that fixed the issue.  I duplicated the original problem by enabling Fast Boot.  So I'm wondering if this is a BIOS issue (software) or if it is a hardware issue - something's wrong with the hard drive and I should think about replacing it.  Anybody ever have this as an issue and what was the outcome?