Primary Hard Disk Error

[ecaryn]

Hi,

I have an Averatec laptop running Windows XP Pro. We had an accident where an elbow was jammed down on to the laptop while it was running and it immediately froze up and then shut down. When the laptop is turned back on it will not load windows and an error message comes up saying "Primary Hard Disk Error". I am not noticing any funny noices or smells, etc coming from the hard drive area. Is there anything I can do (as a very capable novice) to recover lost data from this possibly damaged drive? I.E. can I load the drive from my laptop into a desktop we have and do something (please explain what exactly) to recover files? Thank you.

[Monty007]

There is some options here, first go into the bois (deleate key) and see if the hard drive is detected.