HP Pavilion Laptop Failure

[Sam Donaldson]

Hi;
I'm a programmer but not a hardware guy. I inherited an HP Pavilion laptop that supposedly had a bad HD. I brought it over to a friend of mine to fix. He tested the HD and the HP said it was about to go bad (I think it said DST). However, it said that about a total of 3 HDs, one of which was working in another machine and all 3 of which were tested and found to be good outside of the HP. The HD that was working in another box was able to get us into setup but never completed the load of same. My friend tried loading Win 7, the HP files which override the same, but we can't get this machine to rebuild. We never get past the HD issue, which clearly isn't an issue. What do?
TIA,
Sam

 

[MindoverMaster]

So, you put a new HDD in and it won't get past the Windows installer? What version of Windows are you using?

Is it just not finding the HDD?

Please post any errors you get.

 

[KSoD]

So it isn't the hard drive at all but the hard drive controller that is bad. That would constitute a replacement of the mother board that is required to get the laptop operational again.

 

[Sam Donaldson]

So it isn't the hard drive at all but the hard drive controller that is bad. That would constitute a replacement of the mother board that is required to get the laptop operational again.

That's what I was afraid of.
Thanks,
Beno