We had a few laptops experiencing wierd problems, mostly, unstable system. Reinstall the Windows, or, even restore from the factory image made things worse.
The problem is the hard disk.
Computer 1: Compaq Presario C762 — the system just die often, even after restored from the factory image. Checking from the BIOS quickly gives: Failed – Replace Hard Disk 1 (Warranty ID – error code 10008). Later even the restoration partition is dead. I was tired of the Vista that came with it so decided to install Windows XP from my usb boot disk. It complains missing ntdll.dll (blue screen). Then I decide to let the Windows XP installation to (slow) format the NTFS and it always stayed at 0%, which confirms that the hard drive is dead.
Then I decide to give Linux a try. I booted, from the same boot disk, into GRML live Linux system. First I used fdisk to delete the old partition(s) and create a new NTFS partition. Then I used mkntfs to format it, bingo, after an hour or so, it’s done!
Then all the problems are gone! I installed Windows XP from my usb boot disk, then rebooted many many times to get the Windows Updates, drivers for XP, AVG anti-virus installed. Till then I am sure that I need a backup image for this fresh installation.
So I booted to GRML again, ntfsresize is handy to reduce the volume size to 140GB. Then I entered the fdisk, delete the old partition and created a new NTFS partition slightly larger than 140GB. The rest 20GB I created as a Linux partition. Use the ntfsresize program to expand the volume size to be same as partition size. mkfs to create a linux file system. Then? Mount the linux file system, cd to the mount point,
ntfsclone -s -o - /dev/sda1 | gzip -c > backup0.img.gz
So my guess is that after the a few bad sectors being fixed/marked using the mkntfs from Linux, the system becomes stable again! (Of course there was no over-heating/noise for the hard disk. Otherwise I would not waste my time on this.)
The next week, I digged out our Dell Inspiron 700m. It’s an old old one and at some point we suspected that the motherboard was having problem because the hard disk was OK when being read from a USB enclosure. Again, a quick test from the system gave me the alarm that the hard disk failed. Windows XP failed to format as NTFS (quick format was OK but that gave more problems during installation …)
Repeating with the Linux mkntfs worked again! Except this time I knew I needed a second Linux partition to store the cloned image at the beginning, so no need to mess up with ntfsresize. 
The Compaq computer is being used by my mom to watch online videos. The Dell Inspiron 700m is very close to a netbook. Both systems won’t be trusted to do serious work though. We will keep them burning to have a stability test.
If I do not update this article, then most likely the hard drives are still alive.
ps: to restore:
gunzip -c backup0.img.gz | ntfsclone -r --overwrite /dev/sda1 -
to mark badsectors: badblocks -sv /dev/sda
