Dead and dying laptops: maybe time to get a new hard drive.

Poxed

Estimable
Aug 4, 2014
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4,510
So I think the hard drive in my laptop is broken. It is an MSI with Windows 8.1 installed.I was playing Civ 5 one night while having a few drinks and fell asleep while playing. I woke up in the night and went to turn off the game. It must have froze and I couldn't get out of the program. In my tired state, I shut off the computer with the power button manually with the game still up. The next day I could not boot past Aptio Setup Utility. I tried to create a recovery disc on a usb which I could use on another laptop by booting from it and tried the same thing with mine and it would still boot to the bios. Foolishly, I set the bios to legacy to get the usb to boot which worked. I tried to run diagnostic tools to the best of my ability, not ever having had to use them, and got read errors which seems to indicate the hard drive is damaged. I do have a functional, slightly older Acer laptop that is beat up but works more or less fine. My question is this: is my hard drive dead and can I know more definitively? If so, could I simply use the hard drive from the Acer as a replacement?