Hard drive vs. Motherboard

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My one-year-old out-of-warranty HP Pavillion dv1000 laptop (Windows XP Home) has been slow or unable to reboot, so I'm trying to diagnose it and figure out if I just need a new hard drive (where can I find instructions on upgrading a hard drive on this laptop?) or have to replace the whole laptop with a new one.

One of the problems found was the hard drive was in PIO mode, so I had to repeatedly switch it back to DMA mode (using the DMA-to-PIO registry hack or remounting the hard drive). This occurred weekly until I ran SpinRite, then it stayed in DMA mode for a month.

What I think is relevant from my Event Viewer Log include:

atapi event 9s: The device, \Device\Ide\IdePort0, did not respond within the timeout
period.
atapi event 11s: The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Ide\IdePort0.
a single atapi event 26: The driver has detected that device \Device\Ide\IdePort0
has old or out-of-date firmware. Reduced performance may result. [I think this may
just be a generic message when it gets too many errors]
cdrom event 7: The device, \Device\CdRom0, has a bad block.
disk event 51: An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk1\D during a paging
operation.
disk event 7: The device, \Device\Harddisk0\D, has a bad block.
ftdisk event 57: The system failed to flush data to the transaction log. Corruption
may occur.

Recently the main hard drive went to PIO (even though it crashed while trying to burn a DVD, strange huh?) was unable to reboot until I ran SpinRite. The Event Log has a couple strange events:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: Service Control Manager
The HP Pci Information service failed to start due to the following error:
The system cannot find the path specified.

Event Type: Error
Event Source: Service Control Manager
The following boot-start or system-start driver(s) failed to load: PCIIde

What is PCIIde and how to I correct this or should I just ignore it? My guess is that "hard drive paging error" events probably point to a hard drive malfunction, but I just want to make sure I'm not missing a simple software issue (PCIIde?) or something else easy (battery problem?).

Would appreciate opinions on whether you would replace the hard drive or buy a new computer. Let me know if posting an entire Event Viewer log would be helpful.

Thank you so much!
 
It could be a bad drive, a bad connection or a bad controller.

Ideally, you would take the drive out of your laptop and test it with the manufacturer diagnostic utility.

In reality, you could just take the drive out, clean the contacts, put it back in and do the diagnostics in this computer.
 
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