Hard Drive malfunction

Friends computer, any help on diagnosing this problem would be much appreciated thanks.

What should I do? I’m getting the following error. It started with the laptop acting very slow. Then it would not boot up one day. I did a repair using windows vista CD and it worked for about a day or so (still slowly I believe) then the following error started appearing when rebooting:
Checking file system on C:
Type of file system is NTFS
One of your disks needs to be checked for consistencyyou may cancel the disk check, but it is strongly reccomended that you continue.
Windows will now check the disk.

CHKDSK is verifying files (stage 1 of 3)
File record segment ##### is unrdeadable
“ Several segments reported “
File verication reported
212 large file records processed
75 bad file records processsed
0 EA records processed
44 reparse records processed
Deleted invalid file name….
Correcting minor file names errors In….
Fixing inccorect information in file record segement #########
Inserting an index entry into $0
Then it restarts….
What should I do now? I’m guessing the Hard Drive is finished but is there anyway I can recovery the files? What should I do? Any help woiuld be appreciated. This is for a Sony Vaio VGN-N320E.

i hate to break it, but from what you have described it sounds like that hard disk is going to be no more than a paper weight soon

my advice would be to remove the hard drive from the laptop, then plug it into a desktop computer with that has a spare sata connector and sata power connector. then boot up the desktop and attempt to recover important files e.g photo's, documents e.c.t

that going to plan or not, you will need to purchase a new 2.5'' hard drive, then insall this into the laptop and then re-install the operating system

hope it goes ok

regards,

ross

I have to agree that it sounds like either some large amount of bad sectors being reported or the drive's read/write heads are toast and any attempts to now see a working install go on are pointless. If the unit is still under warranty the best thing would be to see the drive replaced by that.

If you set the drive on another system you may need an external 2.5" drive bay connected by a usb port if you don't have the 2.5" to 3.5" adapter mounting brackets for seeing the drive moved into a desktop.

Then the problem of being able to copy files from it if the read as well as write heads are bad would be needing a data recovery service for any unreplacable files if booting with a live Linux distro like ubuntu still doesn't get anywhere for recovery. That would be one option if the drive can't be accessed while booted in Windows.