Not sure if HDD is actually dead...

[bschneid]

Just yesterday, out of nowhere, my girlfriend's laptop decided it didn't want to boot Windows anymore. Every option in the boot menu gets to the loading screen, then flashes a blue screen so quick it's unreadable, and then restarts. I ran some diagnostics (using the BIOS) and it turns out that the memory test errors from Dell seem to indicate a hardware problem with the hard drive. The odd thing is that I don't hear any strange noises coming from the computer indicating damage to the hard drive, and I can access most of her files still.

The startup repair utility included in Windows couldn't fix anything (imagine that...) so I used the command prompt, which I accessed through the use of the Windows installation/recovery disk to back up her entire C drive to my external drive. So her files aren't a big issue at this point, but during the copy process there was an error in the system32 folder which stopped the copying because I forgot to tell it to continue after an error. So now I know one of the files which is giving a read error for some reason (apparently hardware damage).

My question is this: Is there a chance that the data on the drive became corrupted somehow and that is causing the read errors? Now that I've backed up her documents, I will definitely try to re-install Windows, but before I try that, is there a certain tool which might be able to help correct the problem (keeping in mind that booting isn't an option)? I suppose that since the drive is recognized and much of the data is readable that I hesitate to believe that it is actually dead, and if anyone could point me to a diagnostic/repair tool of some sort it might save me a lot of time trying to reinstall everything.

Thanks in advance!


(BTW, the computer is a Dell Inspiron 1525 and the error given by the BIOS diagnostics is a 2000-0142)

 

[Sniper]

Not had much luck with windows repair myself, so not surprised there. I've had certain files become corrupt after shutting down incorrectly or computer restarting

If you can read the files, the hard drive should be fine (but would be a good idea to backup data at least once a week), next step would be to clean install windows.

 

[bschneid]

EDIT: SKIP TO END FOR THE SHORT STORY
I backed up all the data, so that isn't an issue.

Earlier today, I decided to try to reformat and do a clean install of Windows (as it turns out you've suggested) and I've discovered something else I've never seen. When you go to install Windows, it asks which partition you'd like to install to. Three appear: Dell's recovery partition, the primary C:\ partition (labeled OS) and the Dell MediaDirect partition. Ideally, I'd like to just reformat everything. But when I highlight the OS partition, the options to delete, format, create new, and extend are all grayed out. Is there a reason for this?

Also, One time I went ahead and tried to just install without reformatting, and the progress bar for the install didn't move at all in about a half hour. I don't know if this is relevant, but for some reason it seems to really dislike the OS partition on this hard drive...

EDIT:
After fooling around trying to wipe the drive I found out that Windows had the diskpart utility accessible from the command line which seemed to freeze, but upon restart turns out it had wiped out the old Windows install. I reinstalled Windows on top of that, and so far so good... Right now I'm trying to get all the drivers from Dell's website, but it appears as though it will all be ok. Still not sure what would have corrupted it so badly, since nothing new was installed and no configurations were changed, but oh well. Maybe it just had a bad shutdown or something...

 

[Smartsync]

Perhaps the hard drive developed bad sectors right where vital system files were,due to a lack of file fragmentation the re-install probably placed those files on undamaged sectors by luck. I'd run a HD error check just to be sure no other files will be affected by possible bad sectors.