Trying to repair my old laptop, won't load windows any more. Started locking up randomly, and assume all the hard reboots corrupted windows even further. I throw in the windows disc now and its telling me hard drive not detected now.
Is this a hard-drive error or is there a workaround and its just acting weird?
I had run a checkdisc a few days before I was unable to boot it up at all, and nothing bad came up.
When I got that error on my old desktop, the hard drive was toast.
Sounds like the hard drive's controller is shot. Probably time for a new one.
you could take it out and re-seat it incase it somehow got loose, also if you have a spare drive you could pop it in and see if the laptop can detect it; or pop the drive into another laptop. But if the drive isn't being recognized at all it is a sign that it could very well be a hardware problem. Depending on the controller type it could be that you need to load the drivers during the windows install if the disc doesn't have them loaded, though that is highly unlikely.
You could get a drive enclosure and throw the drive into it, connect it to another pc using the USB cable and see if you can read and recover any data from it, if you really wanted to as it is possible that only the boot sectors are fucked and some data may be readable. I'm sure others who are more awake can come up with ideas.
I am assuming that all connections were checked and came out okay...
If the drive passed checkdisk okay then DSB is probably right and its a controller issue. If you can check the disk in a different machine (all you need to do is connect power and SATA) I would do so, but I doubt you will have joy. If you do get the other machine to read it, copy everything you want off of it right then. The problem could be intermittent and even reading the drive could be temporary.
Drives are cheap. Replace it.
Put it in the freezer, soak it with orange juice and then gasoline. Set fire to it.
Order new hard drive.