I/O Error, v5250 Problems, Lemon?

[seeplus]

Two days ago, my T60p (Core 2 Duo) began running at what felt like 100MHz every third or fourth boot attempt, taking ten minutes to arrive at the desktop (I let it run through out of curiousity..) At this point, the HD was working fine (as far as I could tell.) The slowdown affected all operations, not just a hung driver during boot.

Today, the HD began making a repetitive read sound, like it was stuck at a certain point, and the system became unstable, even in safe mode. Attempting to make a last minute backup of select files resulted in I/O errors/failure.
XP's Event Viewer shows dozens of instances of "Warning: Event 51 - disk", and the Hitachi 100gb now fails a linear read verify in PC-Doctor, as well as labelling many thousands of blocks as "Failed" in the surface test.

This system has also never been able to run any graphics-intensive applications (for fun or for work,) even with only the factory 1gb Hynix stick installed. It becomes unstable and behaves erratically, requiring a reboot. Literally 1 minute of SimCity4 crashes the system, after which it has to cool off for a bit before it will progress past the "Thinkpad" bios splash.

I tried re-seating the HD as well as the SODIMM to no avail.

Does this sound indicative of problems you guys have had in the past?
What about further diagnostic tests I can perform before contacting Lenovo?

I'm going to ask Lenovo to replace the motherboard, HD, and Flexview (it has a centrally located .75"dia dark area). Does Lenovo ever replace an entire system? I have the best warranty they would sell me..

I'm posting this from my NetVista, which has been running Linux stably (with no reboot) for six months
Thanks for reading this wordy post..

[claudeo]

Sounds like typical hard drive failure. The rest of the system may be OK.