Laptop Hard Drive Help

[Gally]

A friends laptop wasn't booting so he asked me to fix it for him. Vista was freezing while booting.

So I tried startup repair but that froze too, tried using a vista recovery disc, same problem.

I tried using ubuntu live cd with no luck and tried installing win 7 but i couldn't get past formating the hard drive.

At first he said there was no physical damage but later mentioned that one of the screws on the back had been loose. Using Ultimate Boot disc I scanned the hard drive drive for bad sectors. On the 120GB disc there was an area of about 10GB in the middle with loads of bad sectors. I made two partitions with the healthy sectors on ether side. Thought that would fix it but it didn't seem to make a difference.

Could there be something else causing the problem? Is the hard drive too damaged to work and is there some way of checking short of buying a new one? I don't want to tell him to buy a new drive and find its not the problem.

Its an iQon M665JE with a dual core AMD 64 (1.7Ghz) and 2GB ram btw.

[Knightwolf20024]

try hooking it up to a desktop pc that supports sata. to do this all you do is plug in the sata cable and the power cable (no adapters no nothing), then attempt to install windows on it.

or you can find the hard drives manufacturer and download the diagnostic tools they have.

[nmeu]

you could also try to download partedmagic you can use unetbootn to use a usb pendrive so u can boot from that. sounds like your partition table is fubar'd. use the partition manager in partedmagic to delete all the partitions on the disk, then try ur vista or win7 install disc. good luck. or nightwolf has a good idea and laptop harddrives are usually fairly easy to remove and are attached to a caddy for quick and easy removal. =]

[+Warwagon MVC]

I'd run spinrite on the drive.

[Gally]

Thanks, ive taken out the hd and ill try it in a desktop. I did a boot and nuke already but i think you could be right about the partition table

[Madoshi]

the drive is probably gone bad.

drives are cheap, just get a new one

[Gally]

I put the drive in an external case, formatted the 60GB partition, installing win7 now. I don't know what happened to the 40GB partition but ill figure it out once 7 in installed. Thanks for the help