HDD error?

I'm having trouble with my laptop HDD. I had Vista and WinXP installed in dual-boot configuration, and wanted to move over to XP. Hoping I could avoid having to reinstall the OS and therefore all the drivers and updates involved (yes I know I could have slipstreamed it, but it would have taken around the same time), I used Partition Magic on Hiren's Boot CD 9.9 to copy the information on the extended partition which had XP, to the now wiped primary partition, formerly carrying Vista. I then deleted the extended partition and resized the primary to utilize the extra free space from the extended. When I reboot, I get the following message: Cannot detect boot media in boot device. The hard drive was set to secondary boot device following the CD-ROM drive. I did not have any floppies or disks in the computer. I tried switching the boot order so the hard drive was in the primary boot slot, but same result. Thinking that Partition Magic might have made an error in copying the contents of the extended partition, I booted up the Mini Windows XP from Hiren's Boot CD. I was able to see all my data perfectly, and got all my files off of it (thank goodness). I then ran chkdsk, which said there was at least one error in the HDD, so I ran chkdsk /r from the XP recovery console. It said it repaired one or more errors. After rebooting and discovering the problem was still not solved, I decided to do a clean install of XP. I used the Windows XP Pro install disk (which had no trouble finding the HDD) to perform a full (not quick) format, and then it installed the preliminary files necessary for setup to continue. After rebooting itself, it got stuck in an endless reboot cycle. It loads the BIOS screen, then says "Press any key to boot from CD...." which I ignore. Then it flashes a black screen and reboots. It does the same thing if I remove the CD, just minus the request to boot from CD. I tried swapping HDDs with another laptop, but it did the same thing in the other, while the other laptop's hard drive worked fine in my laptop. Could this be a hardware problem? To the best of my knowledge, nothing I did should have done a thing to cause physical errors in the hard drive. If its not a hardware problem, how the heck am I supposed to fix it? Thanks in advance for your replies. P.S. The laptop in question is a Lenovo Y510 if that's important.

 

Other drives work with your notebook, and your drive does not work with other notebooks .... your drive is probably failing

cheers ...

 

Agreed, was hoping there might be something else than that inconvenient truth though... I find it hard to believe that a six month old WD HDD fails when I simple repartition it??? And what of the fact that it seems like the BIOS boot loader is the only thing that cant recognize it?

 

Hardware fails now and then regardless of how old it is. BIOS is very straightforward in giving us hints that something is wrong. OS can see something wrong but still try to do something about it ... prolonging the pain and wasting our time

cheers ...