HDD corrupted, or something else?

Hi all. I'm wondering if any of you experts might have an opinion on the situation below. My guess is that my HDD is partially corrupted and one of the systems services is in the corrupted area. But, what do I know? If anyone else knows better, please advise:

Unit: HP TC4200 (tablet laptop) running winXP. I haven't had any issues with it, although, I am have been getting a bit close to the limits of the RAM and hard drive. I have not made any significant changes recently, the only ones being that I loaded a small add-on (Zotera) to Firefox and Word today, and changed some services to manual about 2 weeks ago.

Today, all of a sudden, when it was up and running just some normal applications, I got a BSoD (blue screen of death) with a 'STOP: 0x000000F4 (0x00000003, 0x873BDF14, 0x805C8BFC)' error.

It seemed to hang for ever (like 15 minutes) on the 'dump of physical memory' and eventually i held down the power button until it went off.

It cycled back into a black screen with an non-system disk error, which is weird, as I don't have a disk drive of any sort in the unit.

I turned it back off and on again, and after about 10 minutes of slow and buggy performance got the same thing.

I tried a few things including booting into safe mode, booting into safe command prompt mode, and such. At one point during these trials I got a 'STOP: c000021A Unknown Hard Error.'

I tried to boot into last known good configuration and got a 'STOP: c0000145 Unknown Hard Error.'

Lastly I f10'd into the BIOS (I think that's what that administrative setup error is called, maybe not) and went to the Tools/ Self-check HDD utility and got a unverified disk error.

 

If your hard drive isn't dying I'd be very surprised,if you have windows cd boot into setup and see if it recognises it as a windows volume,you may want to try and repair so hit r to enter the recovery console and run the command chkdsk c:/r .

In all likely hood non of this will be able run or check disk will find a huge amount of errors.

You may also want to try to recover the windows installation by fixing the registry.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307545

 

Now I am going to sound like one of the crazies on these types of forums. But I don't have the windows or HP recovery discs (bought this off of ebay and they were unfortunately not included). To make matters more interesting, the TC4200 does not have a disc drive, and my external drive seems to be on the blink too (when it rains it pours). Of course, if I need to I will just go buy a new external drive, but I currently don't have any disc to run ;( When I boot up in safe mode or command mode it shuts down before a chkdsk command would be able to run....

 

You got a screwdriver?:-D Pull the hard drive out and stick into another computer "your probably gonna have to change it anyway"as a secondary drive then run diagnostic tools on it.

Start here

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/helpandsupport/learnmore/tips/kbtip.mspx

Then download the diagnostic tools from the manufacturer of the hard drives website.