Hard Drive Problem

[RS_Andy]

Hi All, i seem to have a problem with my inlaws Laptop Hardrive, When it turns on it shows "a disk read error occurred press ctrl+alt+del to restart"

I hit F8 to try and get into the safe mode funcions and that dont work. I just get a beep and the message appears again, I then reboot, try load windows from CD to try repair and do a check disk, the cd starts loading, then says press any key to boot from CD, I press a key and then it just halt and does nothing, showing a black screen.

I took the harddrive out and put into my little 2.5 Harddrive enclosure. When i plug the hard drive onto my Laptop it mounts ok. I can see all the files ok. I then did "Error Checking" and that said it completed ok after about two hours. When i try it again in the laptop it shows the same error.

Is there any other way to get the hard drive going or does it need to be formatted and windows re installed. Id rather try getting it going without trying to reinstall windows. (If i can)

The Harddrive is a WD 250GB IDE harddrive running in a Dell Laptop.

Many thanks

Andy

 

[wonko]

If the disk checks out ok on another PC, then it sounds like it's the laptop itself. If you also can't boot from a cd (and presuming that the bios is set to do so) it suggests a disk controller fault.
If you go into the bios setup as the pc starts to boot, does it detect and list your hdd and cd drive?
ISTR that Dells used to have diagnostics tools either as boot options or downloadable to run off floppy/cd/usb pendrive - it might be worth giving these a go.

 

[MagicBoy]

Sounds like the hard drive controller is kaput. New laptop time.