hard drive failure i think!!!

[xxkelzxx]

hi,

not sure where to start but i bought a medion laptop from a friend and as soon as i turned the thing on i knew there was something wrong-it took 20 mins to start up!!! and was very sluggish...i checked the error log and there was repeated errors regarding the hard drive....i decided to use the recovery disc i received with it to do a restore but no joy....it wont even load windows vista now....the hard drive spins it will read the disc but nothing. im thinking its the hard drive thats had it because when i got the laptop it hadnt really been looked after.

if it is the hard drive thats failed i was wondering if i could replace the hard drive with another 1 i have thats in my hp laptop (broken screen!) or would that not work? hope someone could help me!!

thanks

[AdvancedSetup]

Difficult to say without exact model lookups but probably so.

 

Open them up and try to see if you can swap the drives.

As long as the basic physical characteristics of the drive are the same it should work.

[xxkelzxx]

well the laptop which has probs is a medion and the other spare laptop is a hp?

as for the hard drive swapping-i wouldnt know where to start , i would have to take it to someone who knows wht their doing!!! lol

[AdvancedSetup]

Okay, well in general the physical hard drive in one laptop will work in another laptop. There are exceptions, but most will work.

[Dalo Harkin]

Don't want to sound patronising but did you set the first boot device back to HDD after putting the recovery disk in?

if its taking so long to load there are probably a million start up programs on it that have never been stopped if they are no longer in use (msconfig will sort that)

and also if it was neglected probably never been defragged either, 20 minutes aint bad if it was never defragged lol