Howdy, all. This is my first post here - it seems like a wonderful forum. I didn't find a post which answered my questions, so I'm starting this one. Sorry if this is obvious and already answered elsewhere...
Ok, my buddy's got a Dell Latitude C600, which he purchased as refurb. It's using Revision A23 bios (which Dell and others claim is most recent) was using WinXP, has 20G IBM (ntfs format) HDD. The thing "froze" a while back and went to blue screen. After that, he could never get Windows to come back up, it would just cycle through the bios and ask for bios password to change setup (Dell security!) He had another friend reset the password by shorting the cmos chip, I believe, and now the bios is accessible, and all passwords are disabled (including HDD security).
Then I took over and tried to boot with winxp disc. This says that there's a problem trying to install to c: partition. So, then I go to the recovery portion of winxp and try chkdsk, fixboot, fixmbr, and format. They all give errors like bad sectors, and bad boot sector. So, I download Hitachi drive fitness and go through all of it's diagnostics which say the same thing - your HDD would serve you better as a skipping stone. Ok, ok, hard drives fail, and this one seems to have failed.
So, I take my other roommate's Inspiron (running XP) HDD (fujitsu 40G), which I think is the same sort of thing - it has the same exact connectors and bay, and put it into the Latitudes bay where the junk hd was. I boot it and it now brings up the windows recovery screen, with the options of safe mode, safe mode blah, or start windows normally. Well none of these work. They all cycle back to bios startup and windows never appear(s).
So, I suppose what I'm asking is, should I expect simply swapping out this bad hdd for one that I know is functional to bring up windows, or will I need a different driver or some such thing? Also, is there any more hope for this HDD - why can't I re-initialize this disk and start over writing on the remaining good sectors? Basically I don't want to tell him to buy a new HDD only to find out that there is some more fundamental problem with this computer. If the boot sector did go bad, then this would explain the symptoms, I suppose. However, I am also suspicious of the ghost, et al.
Sorry for the longwinded story. If you've made it this far, I thank you very much for your time and your help too, if you so choose!