1526 Vista will not boot..

This is my friends computer that he had me take a look for him. Problem that it has been having is that the OS will not boot. It will not go into safe mode but does take me to the startup repair but does nothing it stays stuck on " attempting repairs" it has sat for up to 7 hours or longer on this. I have tried doing a full recovery from the Image recovery partition, this only got me to another frozen screen with nothing happening. Then I put in the reinstallation dvd to reinstall the OS and again gets me to another screen the displays "please wait" and has sat there for about 6 hours with nothing doing. Im not sure what else to try. Im running the dell diagnostic utility but not sure what will come of this. What could be the issue or what should i try next?? Please help.

 

I would make sure all your hardware is in order given the age of the notebook. If your hard drive is failing, that would explain a great many things.

 

Is there a deifinite way to find out if the hard drive is toast?

 

On trying to boot up from safemode i gets stuck loading driver crcdisk.sys . Am he just better off getting a new harddrive?

 

Boot from a Vista disc and see if you can repair that system file.

 

Boot from Vista disk only gets me past the "choose you keyboard language" screen then sits on "please wait" with nothing doing. Startup repair hangs up on attempting repairs again w/ nothing doing.

 

Well you could possibly have a hardware problem. See if your local repair shop can diagnose it for you.

My course of action would be:

Installing a known good hard drive and trying to install Windows. You have the symptoms of possibly a bad hard drive.

After that try an external ODD to rule out the ODD.