Hard Drive Help !

[Sliver]

My friend has a Laptop. Something has gone wrong with his Hard Drive. It starts to boot into Vista ( I know Vista ! Yuk ) and it gets to the point where the Desktop should appear and just stops. All we're left with is a black screen and a mouse pointer, which we can move around. Nothing works. It just sits there.

So what I've done is removed his Hard Drive and plugged it into my Hot Swap Bay on my desktop tonight. I can access all his files, which he'll be chuffed about, so I've backed them all up onto my PC.

What I'm wondering is, while I have his drive plugged into my PC, is there anything I can do to maybe fix it ? I'm thinking his boot files are maybe corrupted or possibly some Windows system files. Any ideas anyone ?

Thanks.

 

[Sliver]

Above is what his drive looks like in Disk Manager. I can see the first partition is the Recovery one. I suppose I need access to that in order to fix his drive, but I don't know how ?

 

[Lareon]

could be a number of things but sounds more like a corrupt windows install. Have you tried repairing windows?
or first try and boot a windows restore point.

worst comes to worst format the drive and install a fresh copy of windows on it if you've got all of his files backed up. a fresh install of windows solves a lot of problems

 

[LOAM]

Open an elevated command prompt, change drive letter to the drive in question and run chkdsk

 

[wazza300]

The recovery partition will wipe the other partition if you manage to restore it from that,my hp pavilion had one

If you have a vista disc you could try a startup repair,or enter the BIOS and do a system repair,this will wipe the other user partition and re install windows,then you can restore his files from your pc to his hdd