Trying to install Leopard, but MacBook stalls

Hi everyone,

Let me give a quick rundown of the situation. I am repairing a MacBook for a client who complained a few weeks ago about the laptop not starting up correctly. From the information I have gathered, this seemed to have occurred without any preliminary symptoms.

First thing I did is enter disk utility using her leopard install disk and ran all the diagnostics possible on the drive and everything seemed to be okay. I tried to erase the drive and create a new partition without success. I received a resource busy error. So, I grabbed a windows xp disc and wiped the drive using that, and went back to disk utility and created a new journaled partition. After all this run around, I began the install and everything was going nicely until 3/4 through I received an install error.

I went back and ran more diagnostics on the drive, and again no problems found. I wiped the drive again, partitioned, and tried once more, but the install stalled saying 27 minutes left for completion and sat there for at least two hours. At this point I halted the install and made a diagnostic inference: the hard drive must be bad.

So, this is where I am at a crossroad. I just would like reassurance that I have come to the most logical conclusion, and if I haven't I would greatly appreciate any advice.

Thank you in advance.