8890 Harddrive dead?

Hi all,

Well I believe the harddrive (60 gig 5400rpm) in my 8890 is dead but of course I'm willing to get a second opinion and hope there is something else I can still do.
Anyway here's what happened: About a week ago I remove SuSe 9.2 in favor of Ubuntu alongside of my XP partition. Anyway that all went perfectly smooth, nothing wrong with booting or the bootloader etc, so I doubt that is the source of any problem but I figured I'd mention it. On Monday everything was working just fine, I went to sleep and long behold the next morning my computer had rebooted and was at the logon screen. I tried to reboot from there but it locked up during reboot. I forced the shut off and booted back up. Upon booting back up I was greeted with the message "Ultra100 BIOS is not installed because there are no drives attached." and then followed by "Operating System not found."
I loaded in a Knoppix Live CD and I got the same errors, but it booted into the Knoppix OS although with some funny noises that I wouldn't exactly described as clicking, but I couldn't tell if they came from the HDD or the CD-ROM. Knoppix only recognized the external drive I had connected, no dice on the actual harddrive. The following morning I did this again, only it found the laptop harddrive. I then went attempted to backup some files onto my external while I was at work. I came back to find that the file transfer had stopped, so I rebooted and back to no detection.
Today I finally grabbed a screwdriver and hoped that I could find a loose connection so here's what I did.

• I took of the battery and tried booting, and it didn't work
• I removed the harddrive and booted up into Knoppix, the boot sequence went normally minux the whole OS not found. NOTE: I should have mentioned this above but every time it failed to detect the harddrive, the little thing that spins next to 'Detecting: ' that goes around like -\|/- (etc) moved faster than it normally did when everything was working. By normal I meant it spun around at the same speed as it used to when all was well.
• Put the harddrive back in and booted up, and it failed again
• Tried one more time and it booted up detecting the harddrive, but then after another reboot it didn't work
• Put everything back in and once again, failure
• I went into the BIOS and reset the settings, rebooted and still a failure.

Other things to note: When I go into the BIOS here is what is says
IDE Channel 0 Master [None]
IDE Channel 1 Master [CD-ROM] in the Main Menu
Under Boot and the harddrive section is has
- Hard Drive
Ultra D0 (which I believe before said something else although I can't remember)
Other Bootable Disks
Also my laptop configuration is as follows:
Ultra100 2.01.0 Build 39 as the BIOS
1 CD-ROM drive, 60gig 5400rpm Toshiba harddrive, 1 gig PC3200 RAM, and a 2.8ghz P4 with the Hyperthreading enabled.

I think I have all the pertinent information down in the post, if not please ask me to clarify.
If there is anything more I could possibly do please let me know. Also if I need to get a new harddrive would it just be a better idea to try and order one from Newegg, or go through Sager. My warranty is EXPIRED so I won't get anything for free from them.

Thanks in advance (and sorry for the long post).

I guess it's time to get another drive. I figure Newegg is the best bet and a HDD with a 3 year warranty like this one would be a good idea.

Now not to beat a dead horse here, but after not touching the computer with the 'dead' HDD (I had been posting from my work computer), I tried booting it up again and everything went smoothly and I'm currently typing this post from the computer. Of course I backed up all the files I hadn't backed up previously onto an external drive but I'm slightly confused. Is the drive having it's last dying breath? I would reboot to see what happens but I wouldn't mind using my computer for the time being.

EDIT: I did in fact try rebooting (twice) and everything is still working.

Well a Scan Disk and a Defrag and all is still working. Although I do kinda want to harddrive to jsut be dead since newegg already shipped out the order. Anyway I'll keep the thread up to date if anything else funny happens with it.