Laptop hard disk issue

[Nestor]

I picked up an Alienware laptop used from a friend of mine and haven't had a problem up until now. I'm hopin maybe I can get some information here that'll help me out.

The Laptop
Don't have a model or a make; it's at work and I'm at home. it's a p4, 3.4 ghz, 1gb RAM, 60GB hard drive, Geforce 5700.

Back history:

I installed a game on it, Red Faction. Was going to play, went to exit and instead of Esc, I hit ~ and broght down the console. tried to exit the console and it wouldn't exit, so I tried to Alt+Tab, but to no avail. I tried the Windows key, and the screen flickered, but no dice. tried to Ctrl+Alt+Del, and that didn't work, screen never changed. Finally, I ejected the CD and powered off the laptop and went about my business at work, came back about a minute later, fired it up. Here's the meat of the issue: it posts, the drive spins, and then I get a "Disk Read Error. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart and try again". So I do it, same thing. Now I'm worried. I got it less than a week ago. The laptop did not have any prior issues before this; the format, partition and installation of Windows XP home went smooth, as well as all the windows updates. It's used, so I assume no warranty.

I break out my Win XP disk and try to boot to it to maybe do a recovery. Boots to CD, then it says "Setup is examining your hardware" and the screen goes black. after five, maybe ten minutes of this with no response, I end it, and try again. No dice.

I boot to a Knoppix 3.4 CD. boots fine, can play around in knoppix no problem. Restart, check the BIOS. BIOS is fine, says hard Drive is fine, no issues. I pull the knoppix CD and reboot. Same "Disk Read Error, press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart and try again." error message.

I break out the Alienware recovery CD, and try that. Exactly the same as the Windows CD.

If I could successfully boot to the XP CD I could either run a recovery or wipe and start all over. Everything that was on that laptop came from a network share from my home desktop when it arrived, so I can afford to repartition and format if necessary, but I can't get that far.

Brain is swimming, so I'm hoping that I can get some help here.

[pat]

Perhaps you could get a hold of a copy of the hard drive utility and run a check on the drive and then write zeros to it and start fresh.