My harddrive crashed, how to save as much data as possible?

I have no idea whats the real cause.
It started this morning when I woke up, turned on my computer, checked my mail and let it idle for 30 minutes while I ate breakfast.

When I came back my computer had frozen. I rebooted and everything seemed fine. But windows wouldnt finish loading and I rebooted again, same happened over and over again. Not even safemode helped.

So I tried to boot with my winxp cd and it worked fine, until I came to the option menu where to install windows.

It just asks me to format my harddrive which is empty. This is wrong.

What should I do?

You can find many tools on the web that can read the drive sector by sector and rebuild files but you may need to put the drive into a working PC.

also if you can't boot, plug it into another pc and copy over what you can before you rma it.

Were you overclocking?

If you want your data back from a dead hard drive.
http://www.intellirecovery.com