Windows Recovery - Bad Hard Disk

Hi all,

I'm trying to solve a hard drive problem on a friend's laptop which has Windows 7 preinstalled.

When booting, the recovery partition kicks in and checks the system for problems. It comes back with a 'Bad Hard Disk' as the root cause. What doesn't help is that I can't get into a command prompt as I get a message saying you have to be logged in as an Administrator to access the recovery console. It's a Toshiba laptop and after some googling it appears to be a common thing with Toshibas.

I've taken the drive out and put it in a HD Dock on another computer and run chkdsk /f. It didn't come back with any bad sectors, but it did repair some indexes and all seems to be okay. I can browse the files in Explorer just fine, even before I ran the chkdsk on it.

When I put it back in the laptop and try and boot it still tells me it's a bad hard disk.

Of course a reinstall is a last resort so I'm just trying to see if anyone has any ideas of anything else I could try?

Thanks all!

Run the HD maker's HD Diagnostic extended CD scan, after backing up the data. It will need to be plugged in alone but can be in the native hardware since it's a bootable CD scan.

If prob continues work through these other sequenced steps for Troubleshooting Windows 7 Failure to Boot - Windows 7 Forums.