even if the drive is totally dead there are places that you can take it to and they can recover you data....all is not lost...and on most lap tops you should not have to get in to bios if the hd is not working the cd drive is most of the time the default secondary boot drive ..that is assumeing that there are no other drives pesent...so in therory if you have or can get the start up disk for your computer all you have to do is reload...