CF-52 Hard Drive Failure

I highly suspect that the hard drive in my CF-52 MKII has failed, but wanted opinions from y'all. When I went to bed last night everything was fine. I had left the notebook on, plugged into ac power that was plugged into an APC UPS. When I got up today I had a "pxe-e61 media test failure". I have a secondary CF-52 so I switched the hard drives out and the primary CF-52 booted to XP Pro fine using the secondary hard drive. I then switched the primary hard drive to the secondary hard drive caddy and vice versa. Same result, still had the error with the primary drive and still booted with the secondary drive. So I'm figuring that the primary caddy and ribbon cable are fine. And that the controller on the motherboard and the motherboard are also ok. Next, I hooked up the primary hard drive to an SATA controller card in a desktop machine. The card recognized the drive, but XP pro did not. Perhaps the NTFS partition has corrupted...? The drive is the factory Fujitsu 160GB SATA drive. Any thoughts on how to go about trying to repair the partition if that's the problem? There's not any super critical data on the drive, but it would be nice not to have to re-install. I do have the recovery DVD and I bought the machine brand new so the drive may be under warranty. I'm not sure exactly when the laptop was manufactured and thus when the warranty expires. I'll call 1-800-laptops once I've determined that I cannot get any data off the drive and hopefully been able to wipe it with DBAN. If the drive is not under warranty, any suggestions on what drive to replace it with?

Thanks

Edited to add that the bios sees 0gb with the primary drive and 80gb with the secondary drive. But the bios wouldn't see the drive if the partition was corrupted, would it? That's like trying to install an OS on a new drive that hasn't been partitioned and formatted, correct?

 

After doing some research on the symptoms of the drive failure I think it may be corrupted firmware. Specifically the translator module. Now I've read that the translator module is actually on the disk itself, not on a flashable chip, anyone know if this is true? What I'm thinking is if it's not written to the actual disk, then maybe changing out the logic board would fix it? On Fujitsu's website (or anywhere else for that matter) I can't find a firmware upgrade for this model, MHZ2160BH G2, so trying to flash a flashable chip apparently isn't an option. I'd appreciate mnementh's thoughts in particular since he seems to be one of the more technically knowledgeable members here

Thanks again.

 

You may try the windows repair option.... You may have a boot sector issue that may be repaired... But, depending on how old the drive is and/or when the OS was loaded... You may want to either try to rescue the data using an external drive kit (see if you can access it that way) and/or reinstalling the OS...

 

I had already tried to get the XP Pro install disk to fix things. Setup cannot detect the hard drive. When I hook up the hard drive to a pci Promise SATA controller card installed in a desktop computer, the card can see the drive. However, if I boot through to the O$ then the drive cannot be seen by administrative tools > computer management > disk management. I do have several external usb 2.0 drive kits I could put this drive into, but also the Promise controller card which is faster than the usb I believe..? I found a thread on the hddguru forums where a Hitachi drive had very similar issues here : http://forum.hddguru.com/st3500320as-reports-its-size-0gb-t8384.html They seem to think that only professional recovery will help there, but there's nothing worth the kind of ducats they charge for that on the drive. The drive was manufactured in 07 2008. It is still under manufacturer warranty according to Fujitsu's website. I will first contact Panasonic and then Fujitsu if necessary. At the moment I'm looking at a new 500gb Samsung drive to replace this drive. If I get a replacement from Panasonic or Fujitsu I'll sell it someplace.