digip,
i went into the BIOS and there is no way to manually set up the hdd. or at least i didn't see it. i put a windows recovery cd in there and it does see his hard drive.
snakey,
he doesn't have two spaces. but if the boot sector was bad would it still boot up fine in my laptop?
vako,
it's about a 4 or 5 year old laptop so i don't think so. aren't those fairly new?
i asked him 2day to just get a new hard drive, i hope that works. we will see.
-r1