Laptop Hard Drive Trouble

[shenvoid01]

I have a gateway laptop that a friend has had for years. He says that it wont boot windows xp and the recovery console does not work. The pc will post and bios then it will say that it cannot boot xp, when I try the recovery I get the blue screen of death.

This leads me to believe that the sectors on his hard drive are failing. What's your take on this? is there a temporary solution to this problem that doesn't involve buying a new hard drive.

 

[oldskool]

I have a gateway laptop that a friend has had for years. He says that it wont boot windows xp and the recovery console does not work. The pc will post and bios then it will say that it cannot boot xp, when I try the recovery I get the blue screen of death.
This leads me to believe that the sectors on his hard drive are failing. What's your take on this? is there a temporary solution to this problem that doesn't involve buying a new hard drive.

Can you run chkdsk with the -p ? That will look for problems without changing the drives physical status. Sounds like the boot loader is having an issue. You could look here What Is Recovery Console?: System Reliability to see if this helps.

 

[Lexluethar]

What error code is on the blue screen?

If you have an OS CD I would try a repair installation first, it is the cheapest solution (assuming you ahve the CD) and least 'invasive.'

At that point we really need an error stop code before suggesting what hardware needs to be replaced.

 

[shenvoid01]

stop: c000135 Unable to locate component
This application has failed to start because winsrv was not found Reinstalling the application may fix this problem