[ale] OT. Dead harddrive on laptop

[Cornelis van Dijk]

Hi all,
Yesterday the harddrive on my 4 year old HP Pavilion died. No
warranty, extended or otherwise.
Everything was backed up so that is no problem. Now what? Is this
thing self-serviceable? Could a shop do it? Send it to HP for repair?
Or just replace it?
It happened while I was installing suse 11.2, probably no connection,
drive would have died anyway. It will still write but cannot read. All
diagnostics (XP and Linux) tell me that the drive has unrecoverable
errors.
Suppose I would plug in my Seagate external usb drive. Could I put an
OS on that? Would it boot?
Thanks a lot in advance for any response.

Cor van Dijk