I have a laptop which after shutdown it stopped booting. I tried repair, safe mode, and even start with Windows 7 Installation. The screen just goes blank with a mouse pointer that I can move around.

I removed the harddrive from the laptop and connected it to my desktop using an External HD casing. The computer recognizes the disk, but it seems like it can't read it. If I go to My Computer it shows up, but it doesn't display usage information. When I double click on the drive it sits there as if it was loading something and eventually shows "G:\ is not accessible. The parameter is incorrect."

Disk Management and Diskpart also take forever to load and when it does it shows the drive.

My question, do you think this is a hardware problem or some corrupted sector? How can I try to fix the drive without formatting it?

Thanks...