Partially corrupt hard disk!

[hansraj]

One of my friends came to me seeking my help for installing win7 on his laptop. IMO his drives sytem partition had gone bad and he was unable to boot. So I deleted the existing partitions; made a single raw partition and went ahead with re partitioning the drive. As I did that both the partitions which I made were primary and both time it followed with a warning that "the hard disk is about to fail any time" or something similar. Also I noticed that the approx 100mb system partition which is made automatically in any other healthy drives during this stage, was not getting made here. So finally took another healthy drive and went ahead with installation.

My doubt is can we do something to make that hard disk a normal harddisk which can boot on its own?

I know that under the present circumstances that drive is good only to be used as a portable external hard disk with a suitable usb adapter with non critical data in it, coz it can give up totally anytime.

[thetechfreak]

Create a partition of 10 GB and install XP on it

[hansraj]

Are you sure that the XP will get installed and then it will boot as well!!

[Ishu Gupta]

"the hard disk is about to fail any time"

I had that once. I googled up a bit and found that it can actually fail in a few weeks.
As that was just a secondary PC that had nothing important on it I continued using it and still works fine, 2yrs.

I am not saying you should do that but it can be done. Back up content, clean the HDD and get a replacement if under warranty.