[ale] Hard Drive "boot sector" Question

[m-aaron-r]

I'm trying to do a favor for a friend by installing Linux on an older  
(but
serviceable) Compaq Celeron system of theirs that suffered death
by windisease.

As delivered the system would fail to boot, though the hard drive seemed
to be working fine when I pulled it and salvaged their user data by  
hooking
the drive up as an external disk on my Linux desktop.  I've returned the
drive to their box and am now trying to install Linux on it using a  
known
good Live CD copy of Ubuntu 9.10 (erase entire disk and install option).

The installation runs fine and the disk gets re-formatted and written  
to without
reporting any errors. However, after install completion, the system  
will not
boot to the hard drive, reporting something like:
"cannot find device #####-#######-######"
I ran the install a couple times using both 10.04 and 9.10;  10.04  
provided
a GRUB shell prompt on one attempt.

I have since run a final test by swapping out the non-booting drive  
with an
old 20gig spare and have successfully installed and booted the system,
so it's not the box it's the drive, and apparently only the "boot  
sector" of the
drive that is the problem.

Is there a way so salvage this drive or re-allocate the failing boot  
sector??

(I'm not keen on handing back a system with an HD of questionable
size, age and reliability, so I would prefer to salvage the 160 Gig  
original
hard disk if it's possible to do so with some confidence.)

Suggestions appreciated!
peace
aaron