Had a BSOD while running virus scanner and burning a cd. Said something about a memory dump. Restarted and now it say there a media failure and to check cable, gives me a choice of what to boot from but nothing works
I put in windows xp cd to format the harddrive from recovery console but even that says it can't see harddrive
Is it totally unfixable now? any help would be hugely appreciated.

Hello Benellery Welcome to PCHF

Typically a media test failure is a failing hard drive. Especially if you made no recent changes to your hardware.

If you can open up your machine and find out who the manufacturer is for your hard drive, you can go to their website and download a free diagnostic tool. You should be able to burn the tool to a disk and boot to that disk. The diagnostic tool will tell you if the hard drive is going bad.

Hope that helps!

Cheers mate, I have since bought a new hard drive although now I have the problem of Windows not liking my reg key. Anyone ever had that happen? Apparenlty I have 30 before windows will not let me use it.

Yes. You just need to activate Windows. You can do it over the phone if it won't let you activate over the internet. It should give you the option of activating over the phone. It will give you a number and instructions to follow.