I will try to be brief but there are important facts. I dont believe it is the image i put on an existing HDD because I used this same image on a different HDD 2days ago and all was/is fine. Today after dropping the image on an older laptop HDD(which i booted before overwriting with the image and it worked..slowly though) i ran a checkdisk upon reboot after not being able to install SP3 onto the new image which is WinXP, on the laptop. It just kept saying failed. So when I rebooted it went into chkdsk mode and there were many bad clustors. They all were repairing as i ran the check however 3 times in a row it got to the "verifying free space" section and would stand still or appear to freeze at the 30% mark. Keep in mind this is after 100% verifying the bad clusters. So I downloaded and began running the HDD scan from this site. My question is, I read the doc that came with the HDDscan. It seems it only scans n tells you about any failures. So far i ran a surface read test and while its still running I clicked SMART and have results of all gren icons except for 3.
1. Red X - Reallocation sector Count
2. Yellow ! - Reallocation event Count
3. Yellow ! - Current pending Sector Count.

Oh.. what caused me to originally be concerned was I could not install service pack 3... And yes its a legal copy. It was just not downloading. Then when I jumped to other high priority updates, some did but some failed to download...In other words write to a block??
Anyway, after my results are completed, will HDDscan offer a possible repair? Or do I need something new? Its an older laptop (T43 IBM laptop with new image). Dont need anything fancy, just want to get this one working with the basics.
My apologies if the answer is elsewhere within this forum. But ive been at this all day and i did read the rules and faqs. Im ready to snap.
Thanks in advance and great site! Im glad I found it. Anything I left out please just ask. I will reply asap.

Thank you,
Liam
If your wondering.. Computer savy scale of 1-10... 9
Software knowledge or basic software troubleshooting, 7.5 - 8
Hardware.... Its been awhile.
I tell u so you know u can hopefully just tell me what to do and I will know what you mean. Its not for bragging purposes. If it were I wouldnt be admitting to a 7.5-8.
Thanks all

Since you dropped the image on the drive, I believe you are not trying to recover the data. Just RMA the drive!!!!

...or send to Italy, we can fix it (if the surface is not engraved with a knife, of course)

No i did not try to recover any data. I just did a straight overwrite the partition with the new image using Ghost. I think it was Ghost 32 to be exact.. However lastnight I tried running both the HDDscan and the standard error fixing when you right click on the c:drive choose properties n check the box to scan n repair bad sectors. After awhile it just sat there not moving. I then received a blue screen. Looked up the code for the BSOD n it said it is usually bad sectors. Now I have no OS found when booting up the PC.
I cant send the hard drive in bc its such an old laptop (as in probably 4 or 5 years), and in a sense, he sent it in to me... Its a friend of mine who comes to me with his computer issues. If I wiped the HD clean n then tried repairing the clusters, would that help? Or is there a way to fix the clusters without n OS on it, then load the OS hoping it works?

Thanks