Toshiba Laptop HDD not recognised

[Ashur]

Hey guys,
a cousin of mine has a toshiba laptop that he has had for a few months. when he turns it on the toshiba thing comes up as usual but when the computer starts to boot from the HDD he gets a message saying HDD.. failed
when he goes to the BIOS it says "hdd/..." ... "Not Installed"
after restarting too many times the computer boots up and the Hdd partition with the OS on it does not open or work but he has 2 other partitions that work but file transpheres are unusually slow and shortly after they freeze.
unfortunantly although it was from australia, he lives overseas and shipping off to toshiba isnt easy so i was wondering if there was anything he could do to isolate the problem so he could repair it there because he isnt sure if it could be the HDD or the slot for the Hdd on the motherboard.

this is my first post and due to the nature of the situaution i dont know the exact model but i will post it soon. (the specs at the bottom are mine)
thanks guys

-Ashur

 

[Dngrsone]

I'd pull the drive and reinstall it-- it may have some shoddy connections or have shaken loose.

Does the machine had an optical drive? Can he plop a linux live disc in it and run memtest on it?

 

[Ashur]

umm im prett sure it does but im pretty sure hes familiar with linux, might be a bit hard.
if he sends the laptop over i might give that a try, thanks

-Ashur