The hard drive in my parents computer has just buggered up. its recognised in the bios but when it tried to boot the os it says boot disc failure. any ideas?

Doesn't sound like a hard drive problem. The data was probably corrupted. Boot into the recovery console and run chkdsk.

I've booted into the recovery console but it says theres no c drive

Oh, well then maybe there is a problem with the hard drive. The BIOS should tell you that there is something wrong. I guess the computer must not have SMART technology for whatever reason.

I suggest booting with a floppy, preferably a Win98 floppy, and see if you can run fdisk and change it to fat32. If fdisk can't access a disk at all then the hard drive is definately busted.

I would get the manufactured hd utilities boot cd/floppy and run a check with those. A LLF might be needed. Depending on the utitity and the problems.