Need help with Dead Hard Drive

[jvc]

My wife rebooted her computer (HP Pavillion, P4 1.8GHz, WinXP Home ed.) and got a blank screen. The hard drive was spinning and the activity light was blinking, but the monitor was black.
I hooked up another monitor, no change. Her monitor also checked good on my machine.
I swapped out the video card, no help.
I booted the system from a floppy, and it worked normally, but when I tried to switch to the C: drive I got a message saying there was no C: drive.
I hooked up another hard drive, rebooted, and got the Safe Mode menu (possibly because the replacement drive didn't have an OS?;) ). I rebooted from the floppy and had no problem reading the C: drive.
I put everything back to original config, and saw the blank screen again, with the hard drive making normal hard drive-type noises.
(note - the dead HDD is an 80GB Samsung Spin Point, about 3 1/2 years old)
Questions:
1. Is this repairable?
2. If not, is there some way to salvage the data without expensive professional help?
3. Could this be a new virus? (I didn't see anything like my symptoms on McAfee or Grisoft's sites, I don't believe anyone bothers with hard drive attacks anymore, and I thought WinXP was faily bulletproof in that respect.)

Any wisdom would be greatly appreciated!

[glc]

Download and run the Samsung diagnostics.

http://www.samsung.com/Products/HardDiskDrive/utilities/hutil.htm

The "Self Diagnostics" selection should be safe to your data.

Data recovery usually means installing the hard drive as a slave into a working computer.

[yankees9920]

I actually had the same problem.

I had a no input check signal on the moniter, and I checked my video card too.
All of the sudded I got a display but it will not load Windows and it will not let me reinstall it because it cannot find a hard drive.

[jvc]

I downloaded and ran the Samsung diagnostics and got a clean bill of health.
Then I went in to the BIOS and enabled all of the BIOS diagnostics and SMART.
After that I actually got something on the monitor - a Safe mode menu and a Windows OS failure message.
So I ran HP's System Restore (none of windows recovery tools would load), and now I get to do all of the housekeeping required to make a 3-1/2 year old version of WinXP functional, along with tracking down and deleting all of the junk that came with the machine when I bought it:eek: I think next time I'd prefer something simpler - like a fried motherboard!

[glc]

That's the problem with a restore system instead of a genuine operating system CD - good old name brand prebuilt computers.