My PC starts making a grinding noise and locks up after being up for only 15 minutes. It obviously is not up long enough to migrate the data to cd. Should I just buy a new hard drive, make it bootable, insert the faulty one in the alternate bay and attempt to transfer data to the new HD? Thanks in advance.

Sounds all too like a pretty common error IBM deskstar users get a little too often. Do you have a deskstar?

my moms pc haad the same problem and she had to buy a new hd

Listen to your computer. Is it the CD drive or the hard drive? If it's your cd drive, you'll need a new one because the laser is unaligned. If it's the hard drive, either you have a bad sector(s), so use scandisk to fix it, or you drive head is damaged. if that's the case, the drive needs to be replaced.

no it's actually a hot-to-trot HP 8575. I really just need to know the smoothest way to go about extracting the data.

Well whatever disk ya have, it sounds like ya got some bad sector errors. This may be able to be fixed by diagnostic utilities supplied your drive, but, sods law probably not. Even if it could be fixed, your likely to run into more errors pretty soon, and also the more sectors you restrict access to, the smaller the disk becomes......anyways, look into this error according to your particular disk and see what info there is out there, I'm sure you'll find there are far too many people with the exact same problem. You may also be able to recover data off the drive with a data recovery program like easyrecovery professional. If the datas critical, i.e company data and so on, DON't do it ya self, send it away and get it recovered professionally.