PC Won't Boot Up - "Disk boot failure"

[Redglare]

My PC with Wndows XP has been running just fine. Today I was unable to boot it up. When trying to do so I always get a message saying "Disk boot failure, insert system disk and press enter." In the PC I can hear a whirring sound, a couple of clicks and then it repeats. Has the hard drive crashed or do you think I may have a chance to recover? The hard drive is about four years old. Thank you.

[ThomasAnderson]

which type of sound it plays.........?
Just go to the BIOS by pressing F2 and check for the hard drive under boot menu. If it shown it means it is workable.
It can also possible due to some driver problem your system is not booting up.
All you need to repair your computer. If you facing some problem then you can take the help for Drivers updates for windows XP to fix your issue.

[mitch]

in bios it just shows that the system found the hard drive, not that it is good

i would not be in a rush to start playing with drivers ( but with a dead system that would be hard to do anyway)

the sound is the disk trying to read and retrying and after about 5 tries usually will give up

what os
do you have a install disk or if a OEM just the "image disk"