Help! My P.C died again!

[stressed out]

A few months back i posted a few questions regarding my troublesome pc and although i had some great advice from a few people i still was unable to fix the problem myself and in the end had a friend of mine sort it out.

It seems though that it has encountered more problems and my friend is away so i can't ask him for help this time.

What happened is that for a while i would be on the pc/ internet and the hard drive would start to make crunching noises, then the screen would turn blue and it would tell me that Windows had encountered a problem and had to shut down. This did'nt worry me too much as i could leave it for a while and then re-boot and it would be ok.
However, it did this Friday and since then every time i try to turn it on it just has a black screen that simply says "No operating system found on this computer"!
I have tried to reboot and now i get the same thing.

What can i do?

Thanks x

[mattie]

The crunching noises and the "no operating system found"
message suggest that your hard drive has failed.

[rojash]

Yes, I think Mattie's right: your hard disk is no more :-(

[stressed out]

I agree but it happened before and my friend was able to revive it by cleaning the drives and reinstalling xp.

Is there anything that i can do?

[rojash]

I think you need to buy a new hard drive and install xp on that. You MAY find that you can connect your existing disk as a secondary drive and access it to recover your data (AFTER you've got the machine up and running with the new drive).

[stressed out]

Sorry, just had a chance to get on a pc.

I was hoping i would'nt have to buy a new hard drive. I don't know how to install it myself so i'd have to pay someone to do for me ontop of the cost of the drive and i can't really afford it.

x