Hard Drive Problem

So my friend's hard drive is not working correctly. When he turns on his comp it says Disc Read Error and tells us to Ctrl+Alt+Del. Ive used a Windows XP CD and gone into the Recovery Console to run chkdsk but it exits out after 32% with the message "The volume appears to contain one or more unrecoverable problems." What options do I have to get this thing running again? Can format fix this? I'd like to try something less destructive if possible, but he said it would be OK to format if nothing else will work.

Any help would be appreciated.

use a program called Spin Rite