problem with toshiba laptop HDD

my friend has given me her laptop to look at as she is having problems with windows 7 booting up. i tried by disc to do a re-install which too around 45mins, i tried to boot the laptop after and this took about 15mins to get to the desktop.so last night i removed the drive and connected by sata/ usb to my own laptop, when i look in "my computer" i see one partition of the drive appear after about 2 and a half minutes then the other partition will appear after around five minutes. i tried to open a HDD program to try to re-format the whole drive but any program i use just stays at the splah screen. when i did finally get the program to open it showed the two partitions but they both showed as unformatted even though there are windows files on there and the drive is formatted as ntfs. anythng i try to do with the drive is taken a real long time, i think myself that the drive itself is on it's way out. on looking at the drive i did notice that the breather hole was covered by the toshiba sticker would this relate to how the drive is behaving in anyway? tanks for reading and look forward to any thoughts or advice..........................sudeki300

 

yeah she bought it in november from sainsbury's online, she phoned toshiba and they said it would cost £70 to be repaired and returned. i told her to send it back to sainsbury's online and get a replacement. could you just give me piece of mind and tell me if you think it's the HDD faulty as that is what i believe it is and not a virus.because if it was a virus it would not stop the recovery taking place,would it?

thanks for the reply.............sudeki300