Troubleshooting A Broken Laptop Drive

Hi guys,

My roommate asked me to help fix his girlfriend's laptop. Every time you boot it up, it gets up to before the Windows splash, and returns a BSOD with "Unmountable Boot Volume" error.

I put in an XP CD and ran the recovery console, along with CHKDSK /r, as all the stuff I read recommended. But it got about 25% in and stopped, returning "The volume appears to contain one or more unrecoverable problems."

At this point I'm kind of lost. I wanted to try to use the hard drive manufacturer's official diagnostics bootable CD, but she doesn't have the CDs or documentation that came with the laptop. I looked up the Dell model on Dell's support page, and it listed IDE controller downloads for Western Digital Scorpio drives only. I figured it [I]had[/I] to be a Western Digital hard drive in there, so I went ahead and downloaded WD's Data Lifeguard CD, but when it booted up, it returned an error 0201: "Non-WD Drive Error." So is it not a Western Digital drive, or is that error a symptom of a broken hard drive?

Any help? She's distraught about getting back her pictures and music, and I'm pretty sure it's broken to the point of needing a new hard drive entirely. What should my next step be? Call Dell and see if it's under warranty?

Thanks in advance!