Two days ago my computer came up saying that a system file had been corrupted but then went on to say it was successfully recovered — obviously it wasn’t.
It then would not boot so I put in the Windows XP disk & tried to run Repair (recovery console) and got this message: "Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in your computer"
How would I go about fixing this, in simple terms?
I’ve obviously tried Google-ing, seems quite complicated to me.
My dad is coming down tomorrow (I’ve just moved to uni) so I can ask him to bring anything I need to try and fix this.
A friend told me to get him to bring his entire system and use my hard drive as a slave to retrieve my documents – would this work? And once I’d got my documents what would I do next?
I’ve also read elsewhere that I should try the F6 thing when I put the XP disk in, something about SATA drivers – would this work and what would I need on disk to do that?

Help appreciated.