Windows 7 - need some advice

so got a friends laptop handed to me to see what is wrong and i figure i have a good idea the hdd is dead, but i'd like some confirmation.

it's a 250gb hitachi 2.5" drive inside a dell inspiron.

so i tried the hitachi disk tool, couldn't see the drive which gave me pause for thought.

i then tried vivard to see if i could see the drive, it see's it but also see's additional shadow partitions that come up 'disk not ready' on top of that doing a surface scan takes around 43 secs which is far far quicker than i usually see it take.

did a chkdsk from a windows disk as well and found around 30,000 errors of various kinds and couldn't repair them all anyway, so reinstalling the O/S is a sure thing.


also ran vivard on my own machine for that drive, same faults came up and same short scan time.

so does anyone know what the shadow's in vivard are? and i'm pretty sure the hdd is goosed at this point.

IMO, I would replace the HD Drive.

I agree with theog. If any hard drive of mine had that many errors I would replace it. Basic rule I go by is: Any thing I think is important enough to me to store on a hard drive is worth a proper working hard drive.

thanks i was thinking the same thing.