T-60 Hard Drive failure ??

[Truthfinder]

A fiend of mine has a T-60 which he purchased about a year ago. It's been great up until today when something very strange took place.

Herein is a copy of the email he sent to me. Any help on this issue is greatly appriciated.
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I have had an alarming problem with my T60 today. I restarted the laptop, for what reason I now cannot remember, but it would hang up just as the startup got to the point where it was to run the programs that startup on booting it. The hard drive protection icon showed up next to the time in the system tray and then the startup would go no further. I could not run anything and if I put the mouse pointer over the taskbar the pointer would change to an hourglass and I could not click on anything at all. On the desktop I could not run any applications.

I could use Ctl-Alt-Del to bring up the Task Manager and from there I could restart, but every time I restarted it would act the same. Because I had some temporary folders on the desktop with stuff I didn't want to lose I tried started in the Safe Mode and that worked, so I was able to copy those folders off to the D: drive.

I booted on the flash drive and did a restore from a known good backup that I have used before. After that, when I started the laptop, it acted exactly as it did before I restored it. I restored it again and it still acted the same. I used the flash drive again to run Partition Magic and I formatted the C: drive. Then I did another restore. After that, when I restarted, it still would not start up past having the hard drive protection icon in the tray.

I restored from the back up one more time and still it would not start up any differently. It only began to work after the last time I started it I allowed it to to a Windows Update that it said was ready at the time I started it up. When it restarted from the update, it began to work normally again. No matter what I was doing before it failed it should have run normally right after the first time I restored. This scares the ____ out of me, because I could have lost it all if the drive was bad and I had to replace it. I am doing a lot of backup work right now to prepare me for this happening again, if is does happen again. But, I still don't know how it happened in the first place. It crossed my mind that it could have been a memory problem, but it could have been anything.