HP desktop, wont turn on, safe mode wont boot, HDD failure?

Trumandrummer

Ok so my sister called me up saying her computer wont turn on.... i figured it was something slightly minor, and that I could safe mode and figure it out pretty quickly....

Well turns out I was wrong.... its a HP computer, its less than 2 years old, and its running windows vista... thats about all I know about it.

ok, so when i turn it on it loads the bios then it comes up to a black screen saying "repair windows vista recommended" or restart normally" neither do anything...... repair freezes, restart freezes. When trying to boot into safe mode, it gets to where its "loading files", doesn't even load one file and freezes.
There is absolutely, no way that I could get this thing to turn on....

Well my sister had a PC doctor diagnostics test cd.... I booted that, which worked fine.... and it came up with 3 errors. All HDD errors. "spin up / spin down test FAILED" was one of them. So I pop out their HDD take it home, hook it up to one of my computers, and was able to retrieve most of their files....

But this makes me start thinking, how could it be a HDD failure if I could easily access their files off of the drive? Ive never seen anything happen like this before... can anyone please help me out?

Thrax

Stab a compact disc half way into the CD. Whatever track was there is no longer playable, but everything else will work fine. The same also applies to hard drives: that disk is physically damaged in the location required for boot, but everything else is accessible.

Pitch it and get a new drive, perform a reload.