Plugged my hard drive in today and turned on the comp and I got this error upon booting up, "Disk boot failure". Checked BIOS and my hard drive wasn't even listed in there. I also tried setting it up so that the computer boots from the hard drive first. That didn't wor too. Tried using the XP recovery disk, but it said something about there not being a hard drive installed or something like that. Everything is plugged in right. I'm assuming the hard drive is damaged or something. Is there any other way I can try to access the files on this hard drive? If you need more details to be able to help please ask away! Thanks!
Try unplugging and replugging in your IDE/SATA/whatever cable. Try replacing the cable. Try booting from a Ubuntu Live CD and see if you can access your HDD. Try SpinRite. If all else fails, you've just learnt an important lesson about backing up. Go and buy SecondCopy and a cheap backup drive
sounds like jumper, or ide\sata channel is not enabled in bios. if the drive was working and you did nothing, try downloading (free) "hiren's boot cd" and run the hard drive renegerator. it will find sector errors and repair them.
A jumper is a small piece of plastic that connects 2 (or more) pins together. You can move it around to tell your HDD to be a master/slave etc. If you haven't touched the jumper, then it's probably not causing the problem - unless you've moved some other drives around. Have you tried fiddling with your cables? Or replacing them? Pull your drive out and check it in another computer (using different cables).