Toshiba SATA laptop drive

Just a curious question to see if anyone has any ideas...

I have a Toshiba 100GB drive that is a pull from a friend's laptop a couple of years ago. When the drive started giving him problems, the laptop couldn't boot because the mobo couldn't see the drive.

So, after I tried and tried to get that stupid thing to work (so many different boot methods and MBR / partition repair utilities), I finally just bought another one for him and reinstalled the OS.

Now, I have this thing just sitting around and I would like to use it or let someone else use it, but there are still issues with the drive.

The last time that I tried to stick it in an external clamshell, the drive showed up and I reformatted it and marked the partition as active (showing 92 GB available.)

Sticking it in a black-box tower allows me to boot and begin the install of XP Pro with my academic media (glad I'm getting something for my Engineering "fees").

But, when I complete stage one and reboot, I get a general disk error message. I tried to boot it up with UBCD4Win and inspect the progress / status, but when I go to the System32 directory - I get a message saying "this drive is not formatted, would you like to format it now?" (or something like that - remember UBCD4Win is an extremely stripped down NT-OS of *mostly* XP origin.)

Anyone have any ideas where I should start looking to try to "fix" this drive. Obviously there is some kind of MFT issue. Could it actually be that the "firmware" portion of this drive is being allocated as a track? (my only reasoning for this is the "formatted drive" showing a good portion of Windows XP successfully installed, but then a local folder query results in a report of an un-formatted drive (almost like a NTFS hardlink / junction was pointing to the remainder of the drive)).

Or could it be something more serious and potentially fatal to the hardware itself (a partial failure now just counting the seconds till d-day?).

Anyway, TIA for any ideas or suggestions.