Hard drive replacement

Hi,

Apologies for my ignorance. I've been building my own desktops for 10
years, but I've been told that laptops are different beasts.

I just inherited a 5-year-old Toshiba A15-S127 from a friend. It
appears that the hard drive (original Toshiba) has given up the ghost.
When we booted it up, it ran a full scandisk (to my friend's surprise)
and corrected all errors and ran flawlessly for 3 hours. When we
rebooted it couldn't access the hard drive. He said his son had
dropped it more than once. I assume that the HD has been damaged, as
it displayed new errors when scandisk ran again. And again. Then I got
the "a disk read error has occurred" message over and over. Now all I
get is the Toshiba splash screen and a blinking cursor followed by a
blank screen. Hmm... now the "a disk read error has occurred" message
is back.

BTW, I tried booting from an XP install disk. I got it to boot once
but it crashed during the system scan. Now it won't boot at all.
That's got me wondering if the IDE connector on the board could be
damaged? I can hear both the HDD and combo drives spin up.

I'd rather not throw money at this if it seems to be a mobo problem,
but I wouldn't mind investing in a new hard drive. Any thoughts you
folks might offer would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Steve
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Hard drive replacement
    ... I just inherited a 5-year-old Toshiba A15-S127 from a friend. ... the "a disk read error has occurred" message over and over. ... Now it won't boot at all. ... Reseat memory. ...
    (comp.sys.laptops)
  • Re: XP Home Laptop Will Not Boot PLEASE HELP!!!!!!
    ... > some sort of utility that looked like a version of Ghost and Toshiba ... > disk to enter the recovery console, which I did, but I don't know what ... Why wouldn't Toshiba provide boot CDs ... > warranty claim? ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.help_and_support)
  • Re: Missing ntldr
    ... I took the drive out and put it in a USB case connected to another Toshiba running the same version of windows and tried copying the two files from the working Toshiba to the second drive, but it still does not boot. ... Assuming that you have verified in the BIOS to make sure that you are booting to the proper drive or device and that the disk is not corrupt, other possibilities are that on a multi partition disk the active flag has been remove from the System partition or that the boot sector is damaged. ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.general)
  • Re: Unexpected Hard Disk Spin Down
    ... Note that the disk should be set to Automatic mode in BIOS setup. ... Well, I, umm, cough, snort, sort of overlooked that, if it is a true dos boot. ... Did Toshiba supply you with a BIOS update to correct the original problem or was that a technician's setup disk for the mainboard/CPU that you used? ...
    (comp.sys.laptops)
  • Re: what has happened to scan disk?
    ... whenever i boot from win98 disk i get something like "A:" ... and when i type "scandisk" a message appears that cluster 2 has some ... well i have never used floppy disk to boot into my PC....that is why ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.newusers)
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