Cant access my hard drive

My pc recently died, it was acting fine before it stopped working. My last driver updates were for my wacom intuos tablet and the bioshock update for nvidia card. (A friend told me he had similar problems after using that driver) Also I use a lot of anti spyware and a decent virus scanner, I don't download a lot and use hijack this regluarly, showing nothing abnormal on my pc

It started up - to the point it listed my devices, and a message about the ide cable not being connected. Also in the text showing my hard drive, there were numbers that should not be there. My CPU and DVD were listed normally though. If I pressed continue it would ask me if I wanted to start in safe mode or normal mode, both went through the white loading bar then nothing else.

So I changed the cable, and still the same error. I tried repairing Windows with a XP pro SP2 cd. No luck. I tried creating a new windows file.

I found that it was the same as before, apart from the fact that when I pressed to continue, there were two choices , only showing up for a split second before it went black and wouldnt continue. If I managed to press enter on either one before it went black, nothing would happen anyway.

My friend lent me a lead to look at my hard drive on someone elses pc. I can see the other user files, but when I log into my main user folder, I cant access any other folders from there!!! Also I noticed my save game files had disappeared from most of my games.

What can I do?? I am not sure I even have my files saved to CD as I've been moving and have lost them! Is there anything else to do? What could have caused this?

I was on XP pro SP2 and an intel pentium mobile 1.80 ghz with 1gb ram, I cant remember any more than that, but I can try.

Thanks so much!!!!!