Verify Borked Hard Drive & replacement

[Pebkac]

I'm working on my cousin's PC for them, here is the symptoms:

Maxtor 250Gig SATA in a dell dimension something or other

drive is seen in bios
BSOD Windows MCE bootup - unmountable boot volume
slaved it to my system and drive spins up - is seen in bios but not in windows disk management

Should I bother further troubleshooting, try a fix MBR?

For a replacement drive for an OEM reinstall, I know the size needs to match but does the brand?

 

[OldMX]

Run manufacturer diagnostics, maxblast or something, if it comes clean, dban the disk and reinstall it, sometimes, virus can damage partitions render the disk unuseable until it gets wiped and reinstalled

hope it goes well

 

[Pebkac]

I got it worked out, tried manufacturer diags but no go. System has no PS2 ports, only USB for keyboard and mouse and diag tools did not support USB keyboard to hit Y. I then built a BartPE disk which booted and was able to run a ckdsk on the drive and repaired some bad sectors. System now boots and all their personal files are accessible, which makes them very happy. Now I'm just waiting for a replacement drive to clone the old one to.