I was using my laptop at school, shut it down, put it in my backpack, then left the school. When I got home, I opened up the laptop and saw that it was "shutting down" still. I did a hard power off and restarted the computer. It booted into Windows just fine, but then like 15 minutes later while I was browsing the net, Windows became unresponsive. The mouse cursor would work, but I couldn't close any programs, and keyboard keys didn't seem to do anything either. At this point I did another hard restart. Now the computer won't boot. When I run the built-in system diagnostics in the BIOS, it reports that the hard drive is not working. When I boot into Ubuntu from an external drive, the drive shows up and it displays the volume label, but it can't mount the drive. What's going on here? The drive is clearly not dead in the sense that the BIOS can both see the drive, and apparently even read the partition volume labels. The drive is only 6 months old. Is there anything I can try to fix this? Check for bad blocks? Or is the drive just toast?
Try running the hard drive diagnostic from the drive manufacturer. It will tell you if it's dead. Seems likely, since the bios utility already told you it wasn't working. The fact that the drive is detected and displays the volume name doesn't suprise me, I've seen that on many dead drives. At least it should still be under waranty.
