Is this Hard drive death?

[Attila the Bun]

I have a friend who is the custodian of his swimming clubs laptop. It is a Lenovo 3000 N200 running Win XP and it has developed the following problem.

You can get into the BIOS no problem and it picks up the HDD there.And it will boot up until you get to the "Windows Loading" screen where it will sit doing nothing for about 2 seconds. It then shows the "There was a problem loading Windows do you want to....blah blah".


We have tried all the options with the same result. Now to me it suggests that the HDD has died but as I have never experienced this event I cannot be sure. Alledgedly, somebody has already checked the HDD and declared it fine and dandy. But it sounds to me like this kid was a bit of a cowboy.

I'm going to try reloading windows later but I thought I would get some pointers from you guys first.

[Attila the Bun]

Turns out it was a corrupted BIOS.

One BIOS flash later...runs better than it ever had before.

Thought I would let you know in case you get the same symptoms.