A hard disk could not be found.

I have a feeling you'll be buying a new hard drive soon. But first, download a hard disk test utility and use it to see if it's truly dead. I keep a copy of Rescatux http://www.supergrubdisk.org/ on a CD for just these occasions; it does all kinds of fixit jobs like deleting passwords or moving all yourdata files off a failing HDD.

If you don't want to either buy a new hard drive or new computer, you can get some more life out of it by booting PuppyOS http://www.puppylinux.com/ off a CD. It runs pretty fast and has a lot of built in apps. You can save data to a flash drive.