Dell Inspiron 5150 with possible HDD problems?

Hi, my sister has a Dell Inspiron 5150 laptop that she no longer uses (upgraded to HP DV6000t a while ago). Actually, she never really used the 5150 at all.

I was going to sell it for her so I reformatted the HDD and everything worked fine. Then one day while booting up the laptop as always, it would not load past the Windows XP boot screen. It would just stay like that for almost what seems forever, apparently freezing. Then the screen would go black with just a mouse pointer visible. So I reformatted again, and the laptop worked fine again. And a few weeks later, just as I was about to sell it, the same exact problem happened. I had to leave for college so I didn't have to reformat again as I did the first time. Now that I'm back, I tried reformatting and the darn thing won't go past 53% or 60% no matter how long i wait, and i've tried at least half a dozen times.

Could it be that I have some sort of HDD failure? That would be a shame because everything else works perfectly and this laptop looks basically brand new.

 

Sounds like it could be a failing hard drive, but I would recommend running a hard drive dialogistic utility to find out for certain.

 

Agreed. It's almost definitely a bad hard drive, one that's slowly eating itself up. If you want to double-check, but cannot get it to boot, you might try something like the Ultimate Boot CD which is (a) bootable and (b) contains a number of different diagnostic tools.

 

that sucks, I think my sister actually had the laptop's HDD replaced about a year or two ago because of some problems with it. looks like they didn't do a good enough job. I think i'll run the HDD diagnostics as suggested but I think im 100% that the HDD is slowly dying. replacing it will be a bit annoying as this laptop is old and theres no seperate HDD cover on the bottom, i'll have to unscrew the whole bottom plate. thanks guys!