text: my hard drive has packed up and won't boot. how can i fix it? it suddenly and catasrophically died suddenly this afternoon. is there anything i can do to either mend it or recover the data? physilcally died like shooting sparks and smoking or would not load windows?  you can try to recover your data by removing your hard drive from your computer and installing it in a friends pc.  windows should boot and find your hard drive if is not a physically dead hdd.  if it does, it is just a matter of creating a new folder and transferring you info.  if windows does not "see" your hdd, good luck.  if it is not physically dead you could try to do a repair of windows by inserting your windows xp cd in your cd-rom and restarting your computer.