How do I make a damaged hdd readable to bootable media again?

A client brought in a rather battle scared dell. The laptop was dropped by her kids and there is alot of damage to the side of the dell (insperon 1525) with the disc drive and usb ports. The hdd boots into windows vista as it was the only disk that would recognize the hdd for installation. Problem is, the system won’t recognize any other bootable media say vista and compatible ms dart v6. Client wants xp back on as having a previous back experience with vista. Is there anyway to get the hdd and other bootables to hand shale again? Running diagnostics on the disk showed nothing though there are obvious graphical errors and the like.