Yes, that does sound like your BIOS. It appears as if you have lost either your hard drive or the operating system on your hard drive. Take a look at the setup utility, the manual is here http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c01662442.pdf and you access the setup by turning on or restarting the computer. While the “Press the ESC key for Startup Menu” message is displayed in the lower-left corner of the screen, press f10. It should show your hard drive in the setup. If it does NOT show it, my guess would be that it is your drive that has failed. If it does show up, then you are having issues with your operating system not being recognized. On some selected models, you can try and recover from a partition on the HDD. You get there by " pressing either the Start button or f11. This restores the computer to its factory condition.
To restore the system from the partition, follow these steps:
1. Access Recovery Manager in either of the following ways:
● Select Start > All Programs > Recovery Manager > Recovery Manager.
– or –
● Turn on or restart the computer, and then press esc while the “Press the ESC key for Startup
Menu” message is displayed at the bottom of the screen. Then, press f11 while the “Press
<F11> for recovery” message is displayed on the screen.
2. Click System Recovery in the Recovery Manager window.
3. Follow the on-screen instructions."
That manual is available at http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c01854060.pdf Hope this will help you a bit. Good Luck.