Is my hard disk damaged ?

-i have a sony vaio laptop with windows 7 home premium.yesterday when i tried restoring it failed.i tried again and it failed.i gave it to a sony service centre , they said that the harddisk failed to boot and i have to buy a new harddisk. Do i really have to change my harddisk?You did not mention, when it failed, how it failed and what was the error message if there any.



Most likely your hard drive is still good. If it worked a minuted before you tried to restore it, then it is still good. If you tried to restore it from the recovery partition, it is possible that the recovery partition had problem from the begin with and the service centre will not admit it.



If you are trying to boot from a Win 7 Disc, make sure your first boot device in BIOS is set to CD/DVD drive.Failing to boot and replacing the HD are two different things...ALMOST.



Did the service center try to reload the OS? If so and it wouldn't load, then the HD may need replaced. If they didn't attempt this and just suggest replacing the HD, they may be trying the easy way out. In any case it sounds as if the BOOT sector of the HD has indeed failed but given the information here it's hard to determine if all the proper steps to recover the HD have been taken. //Steve
Not always, no. If it failed try the CHKDSK as mentioned, if that comes up with no problems try to format it, if it wont format from your computer ask a friend to try format it for you, if that fails, yes you need a new one, an external harddrive will work as long as you set the boot device priority to boot from external or usb.
It depends, are you able to boot into Windows?



Try booting from a Windows CD/DVD and running "chkdsk /f" from the command console.
first try using a external hd or usb drive of ur friend

if it helps then go buy it