Question : Compaq Presario - Hard Drive Issue

I have a Compaq Presario SR1222nx (about 5 years old) running XP Home.  Recently the hard drive has been giving me issues -- would boot up but then would freeze.  Yesterday, I was able to boot it into safe mode and it worked fine in safe mode.  I tried to copy some of the files I needed to a flash drive while in safe mode but had problems trying to do that -- got a message about "can't copy from source..."  Then last night I tried to boot up and got the message:  A disk read error occurred - press cntrl+alt+delete.  I am able to boot into the BIOS settings and see the hard drive listed (Maxtor 6Y080M0).  I do have a cd that I must have made when I purchased the machine - I labeled it Recovery CD (tools).  I do have some files on my computer that I would like to attempt to retrieve so I would like to see if I can get it operational again.  Any suggestions on what I should attempt to do?  Thanks,

Answer : Compaq Presario - Hard Drive Issue

Download this knoppix Live CD and burn it on CD. Boot from the Knoppix live CD and you will be able to copy your data to any USB drive.

http://www.knopper.net/knoppix-mirrors/index-en.html

Regards,