T43 failed hard drive now working?

[dxdiag]

Hi All,
Got a friends T43 that I've been tinkering with and trying to get working, if it sits around for a while and then I turn it on, it would boot into windows and then slow down until finally it froze out completely. Subsequent boots would yield nothing, only the age old PXE-E61: Media Test Failure, Check Cable. I checked BIOS to change the boot order and put hard drive before network, but BIOS doesn't recognize the hard drive. So thinking its a hard drive failure I pop in an Ultimate Boot CD to run a hard drive diagnostic, error code turns out to be hard drive failure.

straight forward enough, but when I just connected the hard drive to my other computer via a USB to IDE cable it pops right up and I have been running my antivirus on it for last 30 minutes....is the hard drive fine then? I was going to run defrag also, anyone suggest any other programs to run? I will slap it back in and see if it boots up and then format it if it doesn't.

[richk]

USB attach isn't a true test of the drives. If I have a failed drive and need to get the data off, I try USB attach first. Sometimes (occasionally) a sick drive will not respond fast enough for the IDE controller, but will work at the slower USB speed.

[dxdiag]

so its probably just dead?

[Brad]

If you can I would download the Lenovo hard drive quick test here and create a bootable disk.

Depending on the drives manufacturer you may be also able to download their utility to create a bootable disk. Hitachi's version called Drive Fitness Test can be found here.

Brad