Is my hard drive dead?

[LifeAsAaron]

I have an ASUS f8v model laptop. Its worked great for 5 years. I don't usually turn the thing off it is allways on. When I sleep I close the lid and I have it set so all that does is turn off the LCD screen so in the morning I can just open the laptop lid and presto I can do what I want.

Lately though for about the last week or so. When I wake up and decide to open the laptop to my suprise it is shut down. So I got to start it up. It gets to the ASUS screen then where it is supposed to say Windows 7 Loading I just get the - cursor at the top left of the screen blinking away for around 30 seconds. Then It says something about the boot device/info Isn't working/corrupt etc.

I opened it up thinking It was a loose HD (I am computer savy I can build them) and it wasn't really loose. It still wouldnt even enter the loading windows screen. Oddly enough a few more tries later and it loaded windows and everything seemed normal. So a few days pass and all is working great. I wake up and its powered off again and the same thing, couple trys to turn it on and it works. Now though I woke up to it shut off and It will not get to the loading windows screen. WILL NOT. I tried many times.

My asus laptop has some weird built in recovery to it. I try that and It says "recovery in progress"... 0%" after about 5 minutes (still 0%) all i see in giant red letters is ERROR. So something is clearly wrong. I checked the BIOS and everything is fine in there.

I found an DELL windows XP CD and figured I would reformat but as soon as all the data loads from the CD I just get BSOD with the message pci.sys - Address F748E0BF base at F7487000, Datestamp 3b7d855c. Im thinking after the years of abuse this laptop has endured ( being dropped etc) The HD has finaly said goodbye?

Oh and it is a SATA 250gb HD

- update - I went through the recovery proccess again and some how it worked and the proccess finished. Now i restard and it prompts me to start in safe mode, last known config, or normally. Either one I choose.. It loads for a second. I see the loading windows bar and under neath it says microsoft corparation for a split second then i see a Blue screen similar to bsod flash for another split second then it reboots. WTF?
Thanks for any input - Aaron

 

[T0ken]

See if you can get the error details by following the steps below.
1.Turn the laptop on
2 Repeated tap F8 after pressing the Power button
3.At the Advanced Option screen select Disable Automatic Restart
4.Know when the laptop starts you should get the BSOD error details

Test the hard drive using the manufacturer diagnostics. You can get the diagnostics files here

 

[LifeAsAaron]

amazingly it recovered itself to a fresh format of windows vista home edition. there was no disk in or anything either, no key required. it simply had it built in with some ASUS feature. now tho its acting up already.. once again. a day of it working alright and now it goes black screen and needs a restart if i leave it to sleep. it loads windows and i log in and it freezes.. i can move the mouse and thats it. I did a CHKDSK check disk restart and it froze on step 4 of 5... i guess that means the hard drive is dead then hey? I mean.. what else could it be? I dont wanna replace the hd for no reason tho. damit

 

[T0ken]

You can run the manufacturer diagnostics to thoroughly test the hard drive. Are you still receiving the BSOD errors?

 

[sudden0utburst]

i would remove it and format it via usb through a converter (5 bucks on ebay, sata/ide to usb) and then format it / chkdsk it from a working operating system.. sounds weird but ive seen weirder

 

[cellar door]

I'm guessing the drive is going bad...they're cheap though so whatever. And tons of computers have recovery partitions heh.