As for me, here's what I went through.

I have a Toshiba Satelite P15-S409, with some pretty out-of-date grahpics drivers. It took me a while to mess around with NIVIDA installations (which we incompatible w/ my card), but I finally found a working one. After playing World of Warcraft (BC Expanded), I ran into the Error #132, a problem conflicting most often with drivers. I decided that I would just re-install windows and start from scratch. I rebooted my laptop after WOW locked up, arriving to the message

"Disk Read Error". I assumed it had something to do with a bad boot, so I threw in ye' old recovery CD and "Chkdsk" to see what was up. After having to /p it, it told me there were everal unrecoverable problems on my HD. Oh well, I'm re-formatting it anyway. I fixbooted and fixmb'ed, just to come up to the next error after the reboot.

"NTLDR Missing". I went to Microsoft's website and went through all of the directions to replace the file. Copied it from the recory CD onto the drive itself, and it still wouldn't read. So I threw in the CD again, and just went with a clean install of windows. Somewhere between me partitioning my drive into a 40/20 Master & Backup drive, the computer cut off. Now when I turn it on and try to access my partitions, I'm reminded of my 57888 bytes of space that aren't accessible. It states, "Cannot Access this disk". I highly doubt my Hardrive could go bad over a 2 hour course like this. But I have been seeing alot of BSOD's (post video driver installation). I'd appreciate if someone can tell me wtf to do from here.

Hey guys i noticed you were talking about boot failures and i just recently resolved a problem similar to this one this pc i was fixing kept giving me the bsod and saying boot failure system halted i tried near everything and nothijng resolved this until i replaced the disks ide cables and all was well .......im not saying this is what will work for you but its worth a shot cuz you can never rule out a bad connection

but i reformat my hdd, is already done, work very well, but after a one day, the problem is back.. so.. any idea...

@medicnot911

I agree, i've encountered this problem also and i figured it out by replacing the IDE cable...

not to hijack your thread but i have one quick question:

both of my hard drives are about ready to die. seagate disc tools hard drive diagnostic software reported both drives "failed with critical errors". my parents have an old ibm 13.6 gig hard drive. im formatting it with windows right now, and plan to use it as a sole OS drive for dual boot between ubuntu linux and windows xp home. now im not selling this hard drive or anything, so do you think using windows formatting (right click it, click format, select ntfs, so on and so forth) or should i use dban to completely zero fill it?