Checking media presence, no media present

Good evening everyone.

I hope the title of my post is not misleading.

I have a problem.

I offered to try to fix my supervisor's daughter's laptop. She has a Toshiba Satelite with a Pentium i3 and Windows 8. Her boyfriend tried to load a some sort of flash player so he could play a game on her computer and that's when the problems started.

When I turn it on, I get the above message "Checking media presence, no media present". To me either that means the BIOS is not reading the hard drive (I tried looking through the configurations already) or that somehow, her boyfriend found a way to wipe the hard drive. But I want to be sure.

I have a copy of Windows 8 (hers didn't come with a disc) but since I cannot get into the system, I cannot open the optical drive (it's motorized, and I don't want to break it).

I have Windows 10 on both of my computers. So here are my questions:

Has anyone else had this problem, and could you tell me how to fix it (maybe you might tell me something that I haven't tried)

How do I make a recovery disk on a USB flash drive. I have Windows 10 on my computer, but I have my Windows 8 disks.

(Longshot) Is there a way to make the system open the optical drive without being able to get into the system.

Any help is welcome!

Thanks!