Laptop BSOD issues

So, I was just browsing the web like normal last night when my laptop hit me with a total BSOD. Now, Windows won't even boot up. At first, I kept getting this: http://sizmedia.com/my.php?i=ujzjgcznot4z.jpg. My Windows 7 disc is being incredibly sluggish too—I used it once to install the OS and it was fine then, but now it’s crawling. Once it hits the system recovery phase, the whole thing just freezes up. I tried a clean reinstall, but the disc won't even load properly, so I can't tell if the disc is shot or if it's something else. When I powered it on this morning, I got that same screen from the link above saying Windows failed to start, along with all those options like Safe Mode, Command Prompt, and Last Known Good Configuration. It doesn't matter what I pick; Windows just tries to load and then the computer restarts immediately. Anyone ever dealt with something like this before?

Did you set the BIOS to prioritize the CD/DVD drive as the first boot device? And then just popped the Windows 7 disc into the laptop after that?

Yeah, tell me about it. Every time I try booting from a CD into recovery mode, the whole thing just hangs... it just sits there loading forever.

It sounds like your hard drive might be acting up. Just to be sure—does the laptop freeze up right when you're booting from that Windows installation CD and trying to start the formatting process?

Yeah, so I tried booting up again to run a repair, and absolutely nothing happens after that. It just sits there on the blue Windows 7 background with the mouse cursor staring back at me, and then—dead silence. Nothing reacts.

That mistake in the first screenshot seems to be a registry issue—there are plenty of guides out there on how to fix that—but before diving into that, you really ought to check the health of your drive using some tools from a bootable disc. Something like Ultimate Boot CD would work. If you go that route, you can find those types of utilities under HDD -> Disk Diagnosis, and then just pick one depending on what brand of hard drive you have.

Finally managed to break into system recovery, but it’s telling me the partition size is 0MB. Does that mean my hard drive is officially dead?