Need some input on Sony VAIO hard drive issue

[Nem]

Sony VAIO PCG-R505TL

The hard drive is almost dead. I have heard many a dead laptop drives in the past few months but this one is the loudest yet it still works a little. I first loaded a WINPE CD to get it to boot up since it would not boot off the OS. WINPE took forever to find the hard drive but eventually I was able to see files via ERD Commander. After viewing the files on the drive I could assume that I could get the data off the drive. I had a USB enclosure with me so I took the drive out and put it inside that.

The problem is the drive takes forever to be accessed. The computer is able to see the hard drive and then I am able via the cmd prompt to get a listing of the contents of the drive (explorer just hangs and takes forever so I gave up on using it). I can't copy folder via the cmd prompt it just times out after one file. I can do the files individually if they are small but folders are an impossibility I think and so are large files, but I have only messed with it for a few hours so far.

I have put another laptop hard drive in the vaio and loaded win2k on it successfully. The drive seems to be making a bit of noise but this could be the drive and the noise is no where near as loud or the type (no clacking just some ticking), but is it possible the mobo is bad?


Any input appreciated.

 

[Nem]

I installed win2k and then WinXP and they both seem to install ok, but they are missing files. For example when I try to run the SP4 update on the Win2k install it errors out because it says the install is missing files. Now I installed WinXP and it seemed to install fine, but again there are missing files. Network card loaded but when I try to use IE it errors saying Windows cannot load the internet Configuration library, the specified module could not be found.

I have already tried 2 hard drive in this laptop and both of them seem to error out like this.