Hard drive not installed message?

Press F12 and check what boot devices are available to make sure the storage drives do not say none - if you see "none" in the BIOS and nothing in the boot menu, the SSD has failed. That said, a lot of the time Dell's diagnostics interprets a bad OS install as a hardware failure on a lot of these older machines, so it tends to come up from time to time. The exception is if you bought it used and the HD was stripped with minimal disclosure in the listing you got the machine from.

Anyway what I do is I run a 2 testing check on these knowing it happens: I will check in BIOS (F2 or F12) and make sure primary storage does not say none, if it does I know it's too far gone -- note a garbage name might show up and the machine may treat it as a missing drive as it won't know what to do with it, so it's not definitive. The other test I do is check in Linux with a copy of Debian and I check under Disks to see -- if I only see the USB drive, the SSD is missing or totally dead.