bad hard drive? and other r51 help

[mailin]

Hello all.
I recieved a thinkpad r51 from my roomate and it's been working fine up untill yesterday.
i dropped it.
things started going slow
so i shut it down.
turned it on and it said it had to check for errors.
it turned up an error *i forget the code and number* but it tried to repair it, or fix the broken cell/space on disck...or whatever you call it.
i tried to reinstall windows 7, to see if that would help it along, but it didnt.
i even tried taking out the hard drive and blowing in it *i figured it was already done for*
to no avail.
it would read it and recogonize that it was there at first.
now it wont even recogonize it.
to make a long story short.
i'm guessing it's the hard drive and was wondering that if i bought one from new egg, if it i could just plug it in, reinstall 7 on it, if it would be good to go.
i'm worried that it wont be able to find the new drive, and also...i cant find the "extra" partion for the imbo bios.
sorry i'm just freaking out, and being paranoid.
but from the little i could find on the net, they should be "plug and play"
and as long as i set the bios to "normal" i should be good to go.
just want to confirm i'm on the right path to getting it fixed.
money is tight and even though i didnt want to spend 60 bucks on a hard drive for a free laptop..this thing works pretty well and i dig it alot more than my desktop...and i was die hard desktop 'till she gave me this haha.

any help is appreciated and feel free to flame the noob.
thanks.
-mailin.

[mailin]

also i dont have my r&r discs.
i'm worried that if i buy the new hard drive when i try to boot windows 7 from the disc i have, it either A) wont read the new drive and/or B) wont have that extra two partitions that the old drive used to have when i tried to reinstall it before...
maybe i'm over thinking it.
just trying to read as much as i can on here and ask as much as i can before i buy the new drive.
just wanted to mention i didnt have the r&r discs.

[CFoo]

Malin, buying an IDE PATA drive should be fine but make sure you do not buy a SATA drive. It will not fit. before you a new drive, have you tried putting the harddrive in an external IDE 2.5 USB enclosure to see if you can read the harddrive from another computer? the problem is that you dropped the laptop so there might be other issues. Try to eliminate components by testing them first.

If it turns out to be the harddrive and you buy another IDE PATA drive, you should be able to do a fresh install of Windows 7 but you will not have the original recovery partition on the new drive any more. But why would you need that if you are installing Windows 7.

Good luck.

[sarbin]

welcome to the forum and sorry for your troubles.

as CFoo says, make sure you get an IDE/PATA drive, if you go that route. also good advice about checking the machine thoroughly after the drop, but thinkpads are pretty tough.

one thing, though... you mention you don't have r&r disks. as far as i know, there weren't any r51's that came with a win7 preload. what kind of disks are you using to install?