Originally Posted by KirkVining

Well, technically I suppose your right, but in the trade a hard drive faliure occurrs when the drive has mechanically failed in such away that it is no longer accessible by any means. The slang "bad sectors" usually is applied to the problem you described. It can usually be fixed running Norton Disk Doctor, locking out the bad sectors, and then attempting to run XP as an upgrade. If the registry was not located on the bad sectors, chances are you can get the computer back to normal.