As I am a fairly nice fellow, I took on the job of looking at a coworker’s laptop to see what was wrong with it this week.  She had told me it would bluescreen right after the Windows XP logo came up when the machine was booting.  I was just going to slick it as she didn’t care about any of the data on it but upon attempting to do so, I noticed some weird things going on with the hard drive, it failed to be recognized by windows setup.  I double checked the BIOS boot order, as well as AHCI presence but everything was in order.

Next, I used the self-test capability I found in the BIOS, and that failed at 10%.  I had a copy of the ultimate boot cd and randomly selected HDAT2 from the hard drive diagnostic tools available.  This proved to be very effective.  The whole process took approximately an hour or so, but rebuilt 4 bad sectors for me, and the machine booted into the Windows XP logon screen with no issues.  I believe the HD still needs to be replaced, but I will let the coworker decide that for themselves.