[Cuog]

I can definately be a hardware issue, the HD in my parents DELL desktop had a corrupt sector giving an error when we tried to boot, or format the drive or do anything involving that damaged part of the disk. This would also explain why you can use linux, because that part of the disk is undamaged. I took the HD from my parents dell and partitioned out the area of the disk i beleived to be damaged and since then i have been using it for file storage with no problems. It is very likely ok to use your HD booting Linux since that portion of the drive seems to be unaffected