Laptop harddrive dead?!

[dcdomain]

Invalid System Disk, Replace the disk, and then press any key".

I have a Portege3020ct and recently installed a new IBM 20gb drive two weeks ago. Last night I shut it down and today, when I booted it up, after the BIOS screen (Powered by Toshiba) it was stuck on the black screen for longer than usual. WAAAAY longer than usual, but the harddrive light was still on although I couldn't hear a thing when I put my ear to the harddrive. So, I rebooted the computer, and that's when I got the above message. So my question is... what now? Is the harddrive dead? Or is the controller dead? This was really sudden, never had any minor problems leading up to this. I don't even have my floppy drive on me to see if I can boot into DOS to see if I can access the harddrive that way. Now when I start the laptop, the harddrive light never comes on.

Before this harddrive, I had the old original Toshiba harddrive crap out on me because I formatted and fdisked too many times developing some bad sectors.

 

[MWink]

Before this harddrive, I had the old original Toshiba harddrive crap out on me because I formatted and fdisked too many times developing some bad sectors.

I SERIOUSLY doubt that. If formatting and fdisking hurt hard drives I would have pile of dead hard drive 6 feet tall.

You could try buying a 2.5" to 3.5" converter (about $5 from some places) and try testing it in a desktop.

 

[dcdomain]

Hhehehe, well believe me, I do that all the time, but the thing is, this time I was converting from FAT32 to NTFS back and forth without deleting all partitions and what not. It was a total mess. In the end, it said something about the volume heads not matching up. And there were in fact dead sectors, but I doubt that was the cause of the problem.