Ultra DMA Mode - Kernel Errors - Problem recognising HDD

Hope someone can help me but i think theres something seriously wrong here.

I bought a laptop from a friend about 5 months ago - he'd had it 5 months himself. Its a medion, intel pentium m 1.50ghz, 512ram ati mobility radeon 9600/9700 series, 40gb.

when i bought it we reformatted and did fresh install all seemed ok. then i noticed it kept running pretty slow, egg timer a lot if more than one prog running etc. all of a sudden got a blue screen with lots of text and something about a kernel error. anyway this happened about 3 times and did a bit of research and read something about checking my dma mode - it kept defaulting from 5 to pio.
so deleted ide then reboot and reinstall but everytime kept goig into pio.
kernel errors continued and friend that id bought it off felt the HDD was knackered. so he ordered me a new one and after some probs installing got it in and all seemed fine. was fine for 2 months and then the other night got a blue screen and comp went off. happend again last night and when it rebooted it couldnt see hdd so had the 'where do you want to boot from' screen. anyway turned off and left for a while its restarted ok. done chckdsk, ran spyware, checked hijack though its clearly not malware.
just checked ide and sure enough its on pio mode.
second ide channel is dma 2 (always has been) not sure if i need two channels as there is only one hard drive.

laptop gets very hot at times - fan seems pretty crappy.
is the machine done? anyone any ideas??

thanks in advance for any thoughts

 

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anyone any ideas?