Gateway Laptop Keyboard and HD question

A coworker has a Gateway laptop that belongs to his son. It has a missing shift button on the left side of the keyboard. Is it feasible to try and replace this key? I am interested because my friend is offering to just "give" this laptop to me. He attempted to fromat the harddrive and restore the OS, but states that it went to about the 10% point and stopped any apparent progress. Does this necessarily indicate a dead or dying harddrive? He has evidently successfully restored the laptop on previous occasions, but has now given up, and bought his son a new one.
So, if I get this laptop, should I try and test the harddrive somehow before attempting to buy a replacement on ebay or elsewhere?
Thanks.

 

Check for the supply of spare parts at the Gateway website. You will most probably need to purchase the full keyboard set. If you can find the part number, put it into a Google search, often you can find them as second-hand parts. At least two people in threads here have replaced the keyboard on laptops themselves.

If the HDD has only been reformatted, it should have the partitions removed as well. You can use a Win 98 startup floppy disk or burn the files onto a CD and make it bootable. Use fdisk to remove and remake the partitions. You can get a boot floppy at www.bootdisk.com. Edit: This assumes that there is not a hidden partition on the drive for Gateway utilities, etc.

The other way would be to get the HDD manufacturer's utilities. These will test the drive for bad sectors. The problem will be that if it finds them you will need to hook the drive up into a Desktop computer and run Windows Error Checking (Scandisk) to mark the sectors as bad (Norton Utilities can also do it and you just need to boot the Norton CD). If there are many bad sectors it will probably mean the drive is failing, one or two might be not be significant, but you will need to run Error Checking (chkdsk) regularly in case they spread into the data area. If your friend has had this problem several times, it probably means the bad sectors are spreading and you could not trust the drive to hold important data. Edit: try booting to the Windows CD and going to Recovery Console, there may be a version of chkdsk there. Maybe one of the others could confirm this and knows what switches to use for "automatically fix errors" and "complete surface scan ".

Those are the areas I can think of.

Matt