"Hard drive cannot be found" error when booting from windows XP disk?

My friend recently gave me his laptop to repair. He recently encountered an error when starting windows xp he would receive a message stating 'unmountable boot disk' and windows would restart itself.

I researched the problem, and found I needed to run chkdsk (check disk) from windows recovery console. So I inserted my windows xp pro sp3 disk and set the BIOS to boot from disk.

However, during the installation setup (the blue screen you get when you first begin the xp disk boot) at the end I get an error saying 'hard drive cannot be found, xp setup cannot continue' and the it would prompt me to leave the installation.

I am stuck now, i really want to get his laptop fixed because he is in a tight situation with the economy today. If anyone could tell me a alternate way to get windows recovery console on a windows xp laptop, I would appreciate it very much.

Any help is appreciated, thank you kind people.

regards

-Dan