
I had someone bring me their less than a year old HP Entertainment PC laptop, that would constantly hang on them.
Long story short... I was able to determine the hard drive was damaged/scratched from the laptop being dropped.
I was also able to determine it was scratched at the beginning of the drive. So I partitioned about 20GB of the 500GB HDD at the beginning and left empty and labeled as "bad?". Then created 2 more partitions after that and was able to install both Windows 7 and Linux on the other 2 partitions.
Everything seems to be working along just fine now. Nothing is written on the bad part of the drive. You can hear it click during POST like it was doing before all the time, but once the OS loads, it is quiet and smooth running.
Just wanted to share...
