Any chance you have a spare laptop HD lying around? I suppose if you did you would have already tried it but see if you can't borrow one from a friend or something. Also have you tried booting from a different OS system disk? I don't know if XP will allow it but you may try booting off a win98 floppy (if you have a floppy drive to put in it) and then using the dos prompt to get on your hardrive to see if it responds. If you go "cd c:" and it says unreadable media or something gay like that then it's probably your HD.
Problem with trying the above is that maybe XP has newer stuff and will say "incompatiable dos" or something... I have never tried this on WinXP so I'm not speaking from experiance, just preXP theory.
The XP machines I HAVE worked on supposedly keep a image of the original files on the HD instead of giving you recovery disks. That's great and all if you can access it...however you see the problem if you can't get to the image.
Hope this helps...
-DarC
