Hard drive death

Yesterday my desktop computer died on me. The SATA seems to have given out so that the computer can't locate a boot device (or so I have gleaned, being not so very tech-savvy) and I don't have the right disk to compensate for this, so at least for the moment the whole box is kind of screwed. I'm frustrated, since I'm not terribly well equipped to deal with this myself. I don't think I did all that much new work lately, but neither have I backed up all that recently, so there's going to be at least some of my data lost. My dad has offered to buy me a new machine, and send me one of his laptops in the meantime until then, which I guess is nice; mine was problematic and getting kind of outdated. It was a decent computer, but it tended to take a while to start up, as well as fan volume and cooling issues. Damn thing sounded, as Bernie put it, like a jet plane taking off. So I guess a new computer would be kind of nice. I just really wanted to avoid spending my parents' money this summer, and it looks like that's going to be unavoidable at this point.