Stop 0xED

A week or so ago, my friend's (one of my roomies) laptop crashed while he was sleeping, and wouldn't boot.

Fine, I stick in my XP CD, MS Recovery Console fixboot. It crashes again the next night, this time, Recovery Console can't find the C: drive at all.

So I stick in a BartPE disk - now C: shows up . Chkdsk repair it, but it still fails to boot. Fixboot again, then it works fine, but crashes a few hours later.

I say f-it and run PartitionMagic from PartBE and split up the partition, installing a temporary bootleg XP on it until his parents can send in the XP disk, also to see if it's a hard drive failure or something random messing up his old install.

Runs fine for the week, now it failed to boot again. Sigh. This time around, when trying to boot into either of the XP installs, I get a Stop 0xED with arguments 0xstuff, 0xC0000000E, 0x0, 0x0 (I had to use a digital camera to capture this, since it stayed on for about ~1s). I go back to BartPE to find that both partitions have disappeared off the face of the laptop . I think this is a pretty straightforward case of a dying hard drive, but am looking for confirmation (KB297185 notes that a damaged file system has the second argument as 0x32, which this doesn't have - eh, probably doesnt even matter).

He's lucky he got his paper done before the last crash =P

I can't give a 100% guaranteed confirmation, but if it were my laptop, I'd be replacing the drive.

Wow. More interesting random, confusing, mitigating factors.

After pulling out the battery and sticking it back in (first of all, this laptop always runs plugged in, never off of battery), of all things, had the computer recognize the HD and boot into the D: XP partition. Oh yeah, the time is off (I guess this is rather indicative of a power screw-up), and there are other random screwups once in Windows (no taskbar - white bar over it, only system tray visible, start menu only accessible by key due to that), but otherwise working.

I still think there is a hard drive problem (data was definitely corrupted), but am further confused by this event. There appears to be faulty power as well - even running plugged in. And how would that cause a 0xED stop error?
Ideas?

He is getting a new laptop, but I would like to figure this one out as well.

If the time is out of whack, then the CMOS battery may be dead. How old is this laptop?

Faulty power could also cause drive corruption, so that is a possibility.Might want to try running it from battery for a while just to make sure, though. Running the battery completely out and then seeing how long the charge takes would also be a good idea.

I'll be doing that then, probably in a week or so, since he isn't letting me mess around with it until his new laptop gets in, since it's (partially) working for now (it's about 2.5 years old, so getting close to a 3 year replacement cycle, anyway).