Laptop Drive Dying? replacement maybe

[flyingsolo]

I'm not sure what is happening so I'll describe it. My Dell inspiron 6400 (core 2 duo) with 160 gb drive is dual booted to winXP and Ubuntu and I use Ubuntu mainly. Last weekend I was using it with low battery state and put on charger which happened to be the charger for my son's Dell, a newer one with 9 cell battery. So basically it was the wrong charger and didn't charge it. However, now when I boot to Ubuntu, all my applications remain but the data is not (for linux users, I have separate /home partition and it appears empty). If I boot to XP, I get an error something like: "The NTDLR is missing. Hit Ctrl-alt-del to restart."
So, did using the wrong charger mess it up or am I seeing the leading edge of a dying hard drive? Right now, I'm using the Ubuntu live CD and testdisk/photorec to copy/recover the /home data to an external hard drive.
Sorry--longwinded! But any suggestions would be appreciated.
Thanks.

[kilgoretrout]

You could have damaged a lot of different hardware components, including frying your battery. The symptoms you describe are more indicative of a corrupted partition table, however. Can you read the windows partition in ubuntu? What happens when you try and mount your home partition from within ubuntu? Any error messages or does it mount and just show a blank partition?

If you are worried about the health of your hard drive, download the hard drive manufacturer's diagnostic utilities and check the drive out in thorough mode. The major manufacturers have them available on their websites in bootable iso format.

The fact that you can run a ubuntu livecd without incident bodes well for the rest of your hardware integrity. You may have to zero fill the hard drive, but you can probably get everything back up and running with a reinstall of your OSes.