Hard Disk busted

The PC has not been very stable for 1 month or so. It was getting slower by the day, I had problems with my USB ports and even some crashes. The symptoms were scarce though (except from the permanent USB prob) and the guy from a large puter shop told me that I had to reinstall the mo/bo driver. When I ran the driver Wizard from the CD that came with the mo/bo next to the main Driver the status said "Not installed". I not sure what that meant and if it meant what I think it did I don't know how that would be possible.
Anyway I installed that driver and I was trying to manage the problem with disk-cleans and defrags but with no improvement. After the crashes the event log said something about the Hard Drive but I didn't take a note and now it's too late to do so. That's because since yesterday the PC won't even boot. During the POST it stops and says "Problem with Nr3 Hard Disk" (the only HD that I have) and if I press F1 and get to the Boot Manager when I choose to lead XP it says "Error 18: The selected cylinder exceeds maximum supported by BIOS".

Here ends the part where I have a clue on what to do. Obviously I am going to need a format but if anyone knows specifically what Error 18 is or if there's any way to save my data I would be grateful. The disk has 3 partitions, one with Win XP and two with an old version of Ubuntu that I cannot boot either, for different reasons. Can I reinstall Linux on those other partitions and try to recover something from there?

All input is appreciated....

 

The first thing I'd do is run the diagnostic from the hard drive maker's web site. Most of the main drive makers have these free downloads on their web sites, and they are generally bootable. So you'd download the file, create the boot CD (or floppy) and boot to it and run the extended in-depth tests. If the drive passes without incident, then we at least know that it is healthy. Then you can do a few different things: remove the HD from the PC and hook it up to a functional PC either with a USB adapter/enclosure or directly to the motherboard if possible. Then boot up the functional PC (obviously you would NOT try booting the drive you just hooked up; boot to the regular drive C: ) and try to access the data that way; -OR- you can hook up the drive as I just mentioned, then boot the PC using a live Linux CD (Knoppix for example) or a PECD (UBCD4Win for example) and then access your data and copy it to the healthy HD; -OR- hook up an external drive and boot to one of the CDs I just mentioned and copy your data to the external; -OR- boot to a live CD that you can remove so you can burn your stuff to CDs or DVDs; -OR- you can try setting the BIOS to default settings, or 'fail-safe' settings and see if this helps with the error, or maybe try a drive auto-detect (not really a feature in most modern BIOSes, but was common in older systems) and see if that helps....
Good luck!

(BTW- many hard drive diagnostic tools will give you the option to repair the drive if any errors are found; many times these are 'temporary' fixes but will work long enough to get everything safely backed up)

 

thanks for the alternatives dlb. I have already tried booting from an Ubuntu live CD but there wasn't much I could do and Knoppix wouldn't even boot (I guess I blew something when I was making the CD).

I googled for the error that I was getting and it turns our that it is a GRUB issue (the boot manager that came with the Linux). Salvation came with the XP disk. I used it to clean the partitions with the old Linux installation and got rid of the GRUB as well. There were no errors but the PC still wouldn't find any bootable media. So I made a fresh XP install on one of the partitions that were left empty from the Linux and I was able to boot!! I now have access to all my files from the partition of the old XP installation and this is terrific. However, I still can't load that installation. When I atempt to do so it says that "WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\SYSTEM " file is corrupted or missing.
This should be easy to correct by using the Windows CD again but when I boot from it and press "R" it brings up the Console and I have no idea on what command to use. Should I try manually replacing the indicated corrupt file (as I said I have acces to that partition now) with the counterpart file from the fresh installation?

edit: Also, how can I recover the settings for Firefox? Which folder do I have to replace?