Need help with blue screens and possible MBR virus.

I recently upgraded a friend's laptop from a 200GB hard drive to a 500GB hard drive. It is a fairly old laptop (a Dell Precision from around 6 years ago). I mirrored the drive using Acronis TrueImage.

After the switch, his computer works but he says once or twice a day it will kind of freeze up and throw one of these two blue screens (linked to below). He will then power it down by pulling that battery, wait a bit and use it again with no problem.

http://imgur.com/a/dVxCk

He says the second one occurs the most (the one indicating atapi.sys). I tried to view the dump files using BlueScreenView but for some reason the minidump files aren't being created. I checked the Crash settings in My Computer and it says the dump files are ready to be created and sent to C:\Windows\Minidump but I can't find them there, so not sure what that is about. There are a few other dumps in there but the earliest is from 2009 I believe.

I have been researching it and apparently those bluescreens can be cause by a couple of things. While the hard drive seems to be the likely culprit, I wanted to make sure it wasn't any of the other options. He said he ran Memtest86 for several hours with an error (I know that's not enough time, but I plan on running it at least overnight when I get my hands on the machine again). I am also going to run CHKDSK. And I want to scan the MBR for a possible virus. This is something I need help with. Does anyone know if you need a special scanner to scan the MBR? I use F-Prot and MSE and neither of them mention if they scan the MBR during a full scan. I suppose they could be scanning it and not finding anything but I'd really like to be sure.

In either case, this is something that has been stumping me for around a week and I'd really like to get some input on it. Has anyone seen a similar issue to this?

Thank you!

EDIT: Sorry for the general vagueness of the hardware. I currently don't have the machine with me. When I get my hands on it, I will update the post with the model of the laptop, brand/model of the old and new hard drives. Is there anything else I should include?

 

look in c:\Windows\minidump and attach the last few minidump files to yor next reply. I think your HD controller driver is causing problems.

The minidumps may hel diagnose this

 

Hey,

as stated in the post the minidumps aren't being created. The last one made is from 2009 I think. The imgur album included has pictures he took of a few of the blue screens, that's the best I can do until I figure out why the dumps aren't being made.