something went wrong

   Primary hard disk drive 1 not found
   Secondary hard disk drive 1 not found
     Strike the F1 key to continue, F2 to run the setup utility.

that's all I got, any help would be MOST appreciated!!!!

It sounds like you changed something in your BIOS setup that disabled your hard drives. Go back into the BIOS setup, and look through everything you changed in it.

Also, please note that the Ubuntu Desktop Install CD's do not support upgrading existing Ubuntu installations. The recommended way to upgrade an existing Ubuntu installation is with the Update Manager, but you can also upgrade with the Alternate Install CD's.

i went back into bios, enabled hdd,and cd but for some reason, pc will not go any further in start up than before... i put 10.04 cd into system, and because i couldn't find a partition, i had to use ubuntu as 'this one time'. now what? :O

You probably didn't fully undo whatever you did in the BIOS originally to cause the problem. If you get a message on boot-up that the primary and secondary hard drives aren't found, then that's the only likely cause. The next most likely cause would be that your computer's hardware is malfunctioning...but it seems implausible that such a problem would begin at the same time that you modified your BIOS settings.

Therefore, I recommend going into your BIOS again and "redoubling your efforts." If you cannot figure out what you changed, you could use the option to automatically reset the BIOS settings to their defaults. You should only do this if you have to, because it's possible that the default settings don't work properly (and then it wouldn't fix the problem). On the other hand, if no one has modified the BIOS configuration since you got the computer, and you bought it new, then resetting the BIOS settings to their defaults is unlikely to cause serious problems and you might want to try it first.

If you want to use the live CD to double-check for hard drives that are not disabled in the BIOS, then you can open up a Terminal window (Applications > Accessories > Terminal) and run the command:

sudo fdisk -l

You run a command by pasting it in (or typing it exactly) and pressing enter. The last character of that command is a lower-case L.

The output of that command is rather technical, so you can paste all the text from the Terminal (Edit > Select All; Edit > Copy) here and I can explain it.

But I want to underscore, again, that the problem is almost certainly in your BIOS settings, and that the most probable result of running "sudo fdisk -l" is to confirm that.

I know no one has messed with the bios, simply because i am the only person who uses the pc, and when i got it, i was the person who installed ubuntu on it.

i am in bios now... when i go to 'Primary Drive 0' i only get 2 options... 'off' and 'auto' my hdd is not listed any longer... :O

when i click on 'Boot Sequence' it says that my hdd is (not installed)

i restarted the pc, went to setup, and 'hard disk' was listed. i chose it as the boot up option, and reboot... it started right up...