"primary hard disk 0 drive not found"

My home CPU was working fine yesterday morning. I left in on and started watching TV. About an hour and a half later the power blink on and off. We though nothing of it. a few hours later my wife attempted to use the CPU and found a blue screen with white txt on it. I look at it but could not read the message because the left margin was cut off. I didn't write it down either. I do remember the message stating that I should restart the CPU and if the problem was still there I should contact someone for help. I turned the CPU off and when I turned it back on the CPU made sounds we have never heard before. Beep, Beep, pause, Click. The beeps occured in a rapid succesion, then a pause, then a click. Theses noises repeat themself constantly as a white bar fills itself running from left to right at the bottom of a black screen. On that same screen the CPU showed Dell's insignia on it with the words "F2 = Setup F12 = Boot Menu" at the top. Then it goes to another black screen with white text showing the error message:

"Primary hard disk 0 drive not found
Strike F1 Key to continue, F2 to run the setup utility"

We have windows XP on the CPU. It is a Dell Computer.

We have family photos, and personal information saved on this CPU and most is not backed up. Can you please help.

 

bump

 

The beeps signify hardware problems. If clicking was hard drive then you can prepare the funeral, most likely. You can try removing hard drive and attaching it to another computer to see if you can get any data off, but the way you describe it, it sounds catastrophic. Your best option to recover data is to give it to a data recovery service and pull out your wallet. Sorry 'bout that.