will i lose everything on my hard drive if it is dead? or possibly could save it?

but yeah hopefully just one of the other 3 probs!

That'll depends if you're willing to spend $$$ or not. If it's just the circuit board that is damaged, sometime you can get away with finding the same model hard drive and just swapping the board across. Or if it's the actual disk inside that is damaged, I won't bother about it unless you want to spend more $$$ to get specialise to extract whatever data is left on it. Either way you'll have to send it to a specialise to figure out the main problem.

aah k yeah well hopefully nothing to serious is wrong with it.

thanks for the assistance guys.

There are a few little tricks to recovering from a hard drive death, but they're generally really short term, dodgy fixes.

A DVD burner is going to be a wise investment sir Hard drives are getting bigger and faster, but no more reliable. The chances of getting your data back are going to be very slim, you're looking at thousands for professional recovery services, and no guarentees from them either

depends whats died.. it may just be windows being completely screwed as per usual... in which case you may be able to recover ur data pretty easily. however chances are its a dead disk. in which case you could try it in a mates comp and possibly get some stuff off it..