a) see if you can check hard drive using a utility disk from the maker of the hard drive-most have a bootable iso file that you can burn a cd that will boot the computer and let you check the drive. The ultimate boot disk may also let you do this.
OR
If the drive has a fault at the beginning it will not work - you may be able to use disk utilities to move the partition to an ares not faulty and also resize the partition. You may be able to do this if you remove the hard drive from the laptop and place it in the a desktop computer as a second drive and use the administrative tools and hard drive utilities of the OS to do this. This will also let you check the drive. This may provide an opportunity to strip the data of the drive in case anything goes wrong- USB drive as a destination etc.
But if faulty the only long term solution is to replace the drive
eg
It sounds as if HDD is faulty the easiest way may be to buy a replacement and replace it and then reinstall windows from your system recovery disks or download from microsoft's website. If you have an external hard enclosure you can place the old hard drive in it or use a usb adapter to try to recover files.