Help! Inspiron 1525 - can't even install vista with CD (suspect it's the hard drive)

His laptop is a Inspiron 1525, which he bought online from Best Buy.

I've been trying to help my roommate out on this one and I think that the issue is hard drive is corrupt, but I'm not sure. A few days ago, he told me that Vista has been taking ages to start up. I tried looking at to see what was going on and we couldn't even get passed the welcome screen. At this time, there were no errors showing up before the Welcome screen loaded. I got the Dell Vista reinstall disc and attempted to repair the files. Doing that didn't do anything. Therefore, I figured that his only option was to reformat. I followed that guide that's stickied which shows you how to install the mediadirect and vista to each of there own partitions. After doing deleting the partitions and installing mediadirect to its own partition, I proceeded to installing Windows Vista. Vista then finished installing and restarted automatically as it normally does. After restarting and going passed the first black screen (here you can hit F12 to get to bios), I get an error that reads:

"windows failed to load because the HAL is missing or corrupt halmacpi.dll"

It also says to try to repair the file using the Vista CD or continue. I then restarted, and went to repair the system files. After going through the repair, it said it fixed 1 thing. I decided to restart again. After restarting, the windows vista logo didn't pop up with the green load bar. It just stayed stuck on a black screen. I rebooted again and tried reinstalling vista a second time (I deleted the old partition again). After rebooting from the installation the same black screen that came up when I last tried reinstalling came up again. This time the screen said that the file that is corrupt or missing is "winload.exe"

This is the reason that I believe it's a hard drive related problem. Each time I've tried to reinstall Vista (about 5), the file name that is 'missing or corrupt' changes to a different file, so maybe there are many bad sectors on the hard drive. In addition, I even got my windows XP disk and attempted to install it on his laptop. Upon completing installation, the laptop restarted, went passed the first screen, and just remained stuck on a blank black screen...

All I want is to be sure that this is a hard drive failure and not something else that I could easily fix. I'd rather just have him buy a nice new hard drive than overpay Geek Squad for no good reason.

Also, I don't detect any overheating or any other problems with the laptop.

it's running with 3 gigs of ram, accelerated graphics, and t5870 I believe.

I've tried many things following guides I found on google that involved repairing files by command prompt and none of them have worked.

 

When repairing the installation, did you also run a full check disk operation? May help to mark those bad sectors. A linux live cd or other bootable iso (hiren, etc.) may be of better help to do a full hardware check.

 

can you give me a link to one of these hard drive checking bootable isos?

 

Quick google search for Hiren: http://www.hiren.info/pages/bootcd

 

used Norton Disk Doctor 2002 from that Boot CD and it found a TON of bad blocks on the hard drive to confirm what I said. Thanks for the help!

 

Could you tell me what did you do then ?

I too have the same problem .I have a dell inspiron 1525 with vista installed.The problem started with vista not opening in normal mode but was working fine in safe mode(including networking).I tried to repair it using the vista disk but could not as the repair option was disabled.So decided to format the hdd and install vista.I followed dell instructions of media direct and then os but the problem is I could install media direct but bot the os.When i put the vista cd only a black screen with microsoft corporation written on it comes with a slider moving and then suddenly it stops.Tried doing this i think 2 times.Got fed up.Now tried installing xp.Made the changes in the bios and tried installing xp.It copies all the files but when it comes to installing part it hangs exactly at the point when there are 35 mins left and devices are being installed.I thought may be my cd is corrupted.So tried installing linux.This does not even start the loader.Its stuck at "Running /sbin/loader"

Please help me .

 

look guys i had a similar problem with my dell inspiron 1525 and a corrupt hdd to fix it call DELL and talk to one of the tech guys they help (from memory at the start screen where you see the big dell logo you press one of the f key i.e f1,f2,f3,f4,f5,f6,f7,f8 ect ect)