Help Restoring Laptop - With Failing HD ?

Greetings Geeks -

I have a 6 month old Toshiba Satellite laptop. Recently it stopped booting. I get to the Windows 7 logo screen and then I have to run disk check. It gets to exactly 61 percent then stops every time. Then I try start up repair. I get the message that the computer cannot be restored. So, whatever, I tried to restore while preserving data. I left it on for hours and hours and hours. It just seems to freeze. So I tried a complete factory restore, erasing all data. Same result.

So, it seems I cannot restore the computer from the restore partition or access anything on it. I guess it might be a bad sector on the HD. So, what are my options? Is there a utility I can boot from to work around this or check the HD and fix errors so I can try to restore it? Any other advice?

I don't know if Toshiba will help me, I have not gotten that far yet. I don't think that the computer came with backup CD's, just the restored partition on the HD which I cannot access.

Thanks for any help.

 

Do you want to retrieve the data from the hard drive or just format it back to factor spec? To do a destructive repair-

I'd remove the drive from the laptop and connect it to a windows desktop as a secondary then run the hard drives manufacturers tools on it to check it's integrity,if the drive is functional I would then run check disk while the drive is connected as a secondary drive within windows to see if it completes with automatically repair and recover bad sectors selected, if the manufacturers tools have this option or similar to recover bad sectors you could use that also.

I would then clone/copy the recovery partition and save it somewhere so it's safe as it has the only legal copy of windows on it, if the drive can't be read during the clone procedure then the problem maybe deeper than software can recover so-

Then do a low level format of the entire drive using the manufacturers tools.

http://www.ariolic.com/activesmart/low-level-format.html

Format in ntfs,then copy the cloned partition back to the original drive and see if it can be recovered using the laptops built in recovery tools,if not the recovery partition is probably too corrupt so try a full windows install.