Have I lost my entire hard drive?

When this happened to me, I had to do a system restore. THANKFULLY, I was given the option to backup my files during the restore and was able to access them once I got up & running again. Depending on how badly the virus has attacked your system, you may not be able to get them back, though. If you are able to access them again, get them backed up to an EHD.
Before buying a new laptop, try doing a system restore with the disks that came with your machine. If you don't have them, you may be able to order them from the manufacturer for a nominal fee.

ar first try to boot into your computer using a linux live cd )you dont have install linux - you can boot up with just the cd).
See if you see the files using the file browser in linux - if you do then just copy the files to an external hard drive and you should be good

Another option would be to try and just restart your computer a few times.. especially if the computer your using is a Dell... they have a tendency to sometimes display that msg when the computer starts to get old, or used a lot.. or just anytime really; it's an issue Dells can have.

If that doesn't work, and you can't start up at all.. then I would suggest following Mirza's advice, and see if that works.

Lastly, as I just told someone in another post.. if you have things on your laptop that are critical to your life, you can always take the HD to a recovery place and have them get the files back the hard way. :-/ treat this as a last resort though, cause it's pricey.

I agree heartily with the above posts, just wanted to add one more thing:

The one thing to remember is that MOST of the time when a windows machine won't boot, it's not because the hard drive has crashed, or a virus deleted your files. It's typically because something near the beginning of the drive got corrupted. You can usually boot some other way (linux live cd, or recovery disks) and get your files out, then repair the system.

(Of course, make sure that you scan the files you got back out with some sort of virus scanning thing before you put them onto a new computer...)

try fdsk /mbr

Always make backups.

Remove your hard drive and put in a USB Hard Drive Caddy. It may only be the boot partition on your hard drive that is damaged and not ncessarily that your data i gone.
You can then attached the USB Caddy to a working computer and if it's still ok then you should see it as another drive, like using a USB Pen drive.

FDISK /mbr is for more experienced person. I will not recomend it.