PC Problem ( techs needed big time) Options

[prompt]

OK, here is the problem. My mother shut her PC (2ghz celeron EMachine; WinXP) down 4 days ago, and like usual left it to shut off. Well when she came back it didnt shut down. It was just sitting there with the keyboard,mouse,and tower light flashing all syncranized(sp?). So we switched out the power supply since the fan wouldnt turn on it. Nope, that wasn't the problem. So we then decided to take the hard drive and connect it to 2 other PC's we had sitting around the house.

One of them is a 733Mhz Hewlett Packard. When we connect it it says a disk error. Then we tried the other PC. Which is slower then a 1.3 but faster than the HP. We connected it and it got to the point of loading up to safe mode, but then it just sits there along with all the other modes.

So any ideas of what might be wrong? And Do you think the hard drive crapped the bed?

[Illyont]

Step #1: Take the harddrive with important data and try to use it as a slave disk in another computer (and copy the important stuff out).

If that works, then fine. If not

Step #2: Buy a cheap ass "harddrive crapped all over itself"-device from some kind of electronic/gadget/computer store somewhere and connect the drive to that device. Then into one of your other computers and extract the data. Those devices can usually extract deleted data also. I have used it several times to get back e-mail and other files that got deleted by accident. I'm just not sure what it would be called in English.

Step #3: You should have gotten your data back at this step even if the harddrive is damaged or not. So get a new harddrive and put data back where it should be, and also make a permanent backup of all the important stuff. Then install the operative system of choice and you should be back on track.

Another option is taking the computer, or maybe even just the harddrive with data to a company nearby that do things like that. Extracting deleted data or fixing broken harddrives.