Laptop Hardrive problem?

[AlNasty]

My neighbor has a IBM T-22 laptop. A few months ago it crashed, and display something
to the effect of HARD DRIVE FAILURE. He dropped it off with me, and I reformatted the HD, updated his long outdated BIOS and reloaded the OS. The other day it would not boot to Windows, saying it was missing some file. Again, he dropped it off and although it got through POST, Windows never appeared. I reset the BIOS settings to default, and started to reload XP Pro. When it got to the spot where it highlights your C drive, it showed the entire hard drive(20g)as being free space(all but 1 mb) like there was nothing on it. I went ahead and reinstalled the OS, virus stuff, updates, etc, and then used it for about 5 hours total. The next day he called to say it came back up with a file missing error, and Windows will not load.

Sounds to me like when the BIOS looks for the data during the boot process, it is not finding it on the hard drive (ie: hard drive is not working). Any suggestions.

Also, I looked into a replacment drive, and I see ata 5, ata 6, ata 7 listed. I recall his being a ata 5. Will a ata 7 work with his IBM T-22, or can I only install a ata 5 in it?


Thanks

 

[JimPhelpsMI]

Hi, I'm not real up on XP, but since you are getting no help I will stick my 2 cents in. Maybe you are using a formater that cares not for bad sectors. MaxBlast is one of those. The drive may have bad spots that are not being flagged. Run a Hard Driver diagnostic similar to ScanDisk on that drive. The Old Fashioned FORMAT.EXE does check for bad sectors. Jim