Primary hard drive failure does not mean it is broke. (although it could be aswell) but there is avery good chance it is not broke.
You need to do exactly what Jazz has said with good advice of backing everything up you need that is important to you. Once this is done. Switch your computer off. then take the case of and check that the conedctions on the hard drive are sitting tight.
It sounds lie you have a power failure on the drive, to me this could easily be loose conection. I ahd the same problem funny enough a week or 2 ago. I installed a new 120 gig slave drive 2 days later i had a primary hard drive failure. It turned out the conection (power lead) had worked loose. And i ahve a feeling that this may of happened to you.
It could be rigfhting itself it only needs to move a millimetre or 2 to give power and move the same to drop power if the cable is loose.
Do you have the full xp home disk or is it recovery disk?
What company and recovery disk is it from?
If you have the xp home full disk then i can explain how to doa full repair.
Read this about recovery console.
http://support.microsoft.com/default...;en-us;Q307654
Also if you ahve time read through this link.
http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/xp_qr.htm
Save this last link for future reading, there is a lot fo good info there.