Hello. The other day i booted up my laptop and got a "hard disk or disk error. Press ctrl+alt+delete to restart" This has happened before like a couple of months ago, but i just reformatted. Now i have alot more programs i installed since that time on the harddisk and i don't feel like sitting through a whole 8 hour microsoft reinstall marathon. What's puzzling me is the hd passes all tests, (chkdsk and others)no corruption, bad sectors, errors, etc. I tried fixboot and fixmbr in windows recovery console, no luck. I attach the hd to my desktop in an enclosure, it boots right up and i can see all my data. This is good, but i just really want to fix it, and i know it must be something stupid like the os doesn't know where the mbr is or something. Reformatting is my last resort. Can someone give me some advice on what to do here? Is there any hope or should i just reformat it? Thanks

It could be that the hard drive is a little slow getting up to speed. I had that problem and fixed it by changing the bios to slow the boot down a little. If you have a 'fast boot' option in the bios, you could try disabling it. Also, you could change the boot sequence to make the floppy drive first, the CD/DVD drive second, and the hard drive last.