Pavilion dv4-1225dx HDD problem

A friend of mine has a Pavilion dv4-1225dx notebook and spilled some wine that according to him hardly hit the laptop, but something happened as it doesn't want to work anymore.

He called HP and the notebook was shipped to them, then he got a call and they told him that the warranty was void as there was liquid damage.

I took the thing, put it my Vista DVD from my Dell and it did start up, but just before it wanted to install it couldn't find the hard drive and asked me for a driver I don't have. I did download all the drivers from the HP support site but I'm not sure if that driver was even there. Nothing of what I downloaded worked.

Ran the memory and hard drive test and hard drive test failed. Replaced the hard drive with a new one that was already formatted and ran the test again. At least this time it did see a hard drive, though the test failed again and it gave me some error code (think it was 10008).

Could this be a driver issue or might it be the mother board? I don't think it's worth putting a lot of money in the notebook but if it's a driver issue I'd try to fix it.

Basically I don't even get to the point where I could install Windows as it seems to be unable to address the hard drive.

Any input would be appreciated.

Thanks

That's what I thought as I've never had anything like this before. Guess althought the thing isn't all that old yet it might just not pay to fix it.

Not sure if anything out of the thing could be used but getting a new motherboard ir probably too expensive.

Thanks

Thanks ghn, I've sure got enough time over the holidays to try that. Otherwise I might just try to to find out if I can sell the display or something so it's not a total loss. Not sure if he wants to spend the money for a replacement mother board as it wasn't that pricey a laptop in the first place. Wonder what memory it's got in there, I could use 4GB for my Dell M6400, but I bet it's too different.

Thanks