Hard drive corrupt?

[NoodleTech]

Hello, my friend has a HP s3120n slimline PC that had windows vista home premium installed on it.

It is only 2 months old and hasn't given him any problems since he bought it, but suddenly when he tried to boot up his computer this morning, it gave him the "Invalid system disk. Replace the disk, and then press any key" message.

Restarting it doesn't help. He doesn't have a floppy drive, so the system isn't trying to boot from there. I think the hard drive is corrupt because when I loaded the windows XP cd and went to the partitioning/reformatting page, I see his hard drive as unpartitioned space.

I also see some other weird stuff in the partitioning screen:

Screenshot 1
Screenshot 2

What are those unknown disks I see in the list below unpartitioned space? I've never seen that before when I reformat. Is this because windows XP doesnt recognize the vista partition?

Does my friend's hard drive need to be replaced or does it just need a reformat?

 

[RebateMonger]

Originally posted by: NoodleTech
Does my friend's hard drive need to be replaced or does it just need a reformat?

Can't really tell from the information available. Use the drive maker's diagnostics program to test the drive and see what, if anything, is wrong with it. Otherwise, it COULD be a case of software corruption (MBR record, for instance). That can happen without any hardware problem (although it's not as likely nowadays as it was ten years ago).

The "no disk" drives are likely memory card readers on the PC.

 

[NoodleTech]

are there any free diagnostic programs I can download, burn to a cd, and boot from it? HP didn't bundle any diag utilities for the samsung drive.

 

[RebateMonger]

Originally posted by: NoodleTech
are there any free diagnostic programs I can download, burn to a cd, and boot from it? HP didn't bundle any diag utilities for the samsung drive.

Samsung Disk Diagnostics program: HUTIL

 

[NoodleTech]

Thank you. I had tried that utility before, but it could not load a driver for his SATA DVD rom drive. I had to place the drive in my other pc which had an IDE cd drive. The HD passed all tests. However, my friend noted that the computer lagged horribly before the computer restarted and would not boot up... I believe the drive could possibly fail in the future. What else could cause the partition or the boot sector to go corrupt? Should I trust the HUTIL test results and assume that the hard drive is fine?