HP 530 not booting

[DjKraid]

Hi!

I have a friends laptop that once again broken. The last time I fixed it
the psu was broken and now I believe that the psu is gone again and
then there is something else too.

Some times the laptop "goes on" and sometimes the power light just
blinks 8 times (and that is psu fault if I'm not mistaking). Anyhow when
it goes on I get this message:

--------------------------------------------------------
Non-System disk or disk error
replace and strike any key when ready
--------------------------------------------------------

And I guess that's the hdd that has gone bad? -I not last time but the
time before that when I fixed this laptop I changed the hdd to a new one.
So the hdd is ~8-10 months old and the psu is ~6 months old (hp original).

So the real question is that is it worth fixing this laptop or just get a new
one and is the does that message mean that the hdd is 100% dead or just
that the laptops mobo is fu**ed up?

thx in advance!

 

[DjKraid]

First I got an other PSU so I got the laptop running and battery charged but the message above always appear. The BIOS can't find the hdd and I also ran a xubuntu 9.10 live cd but it didn't find anything (I also ran a memory test even to see if it could find any other problems). So when the laptop can't find / do anything I took the hdd out an connected it to my computer but still nothing. First I just connected it when the computer was on but it didn't recognize any hardware changes so I rebooted but my computer can't boot when the hdd is connected so I disconnected the hdd and when I got the cable disconnected my computer booted up as normal. So I connected the hdd again and rebooted to see if my BIOS was slow or something but still nothing...

So I guess the hdd is dead? -again

btw, the hdd is a Seagate 120Gb SATA drive