Laptop Hard Drive Issue

Okay, so basically whilst considering buying and building my own computer a friend in the dorm mentioned his year old Asus G1S that he doesn't touch anymore due to a virus. Feeling brave I took a whack at it and tried my luck with fixing the problem, with absolutly no luck. Now the system itself is immaculate, everything was very well maintained and there were no issues. I was planning on attempting to boot off of a killdisk cd and simply purging everything from the HD. What I wanted to ask you guys was, 1. Would this be the best way to go. 2. Should I just dump the drive, buy new and start fresh. 3. Forget the whole project and give it back.

We settled on 200 bucks for the laptop if i get it working which is a steal considering he paid over 1800 for it. If I cannot kill everything off the drive I was gonna buy Western Digital Scorpio Black WD3200BEKT 320GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Notebook Hard Drive - OEM : http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6822136280 and then snag a nice Vistas Home 64-bit. Let me know what you guys think, thanks again in advance.