Flaky memory? Advice needed!

*Nevermind. Some switching around revealed one of the two sticks is as faulty as it gets.*

I've been experiencing problems with my laptop the last few days. Sudden bluescreens, restarts. Ran the diagnostics included in the bios from HP, memory came back 'ok' but it told me to replace my harddrive at the hd-test. So next thing I did was hook up my hd to my desktop to take an image of it.

Afterwards I started checking into finding a second confirmation that the drive indeed is the problem. So I ran hdtune on it. At first it seemed like it couldn't read out the smart data on it, but the error scan came back with one damaged block. Today the smart function suddenly started working, and hdtune says the drive is fine. It does however show a warning that the 'reallocated sector count' has reached the critical value once. So I suppose the drive is on its way out though?

Knowing the aforementioned I decided to pop a bootable memtest copy in my laptop and fired it up without the hd attached to the laptop. (Am I correct assuming this shouldn't make any changes to the outcome of the test?)

So far all results I've been seeing on memtest are marked in red and an insane amount of errors in the overview (say a 100 less or so than the test count being at around ~40.000 atm).

Am I right in assuming the memory is definately the culprit here, or could this have something to do with the drive not being installed? (Sounds hard to believe the thing even worked for more than half an hour without restarts/bluescreens with that amount of memory errors..)

Hmm, I had a friend with similar issues, I advised him to replace HDD. But if it was me I replace both memory and HDD just to be on the safe side.

The 500 GB drive in my system was considered dead by the previous owner. Smart said so and it wouldn't function. on a lark I cracked the partition and reformated it. that was in 2006 or 2007. it is still working fine to this day. just recent ly I had a system giving BSODs steady. did the same to it and it's working perfectly now. sometimes the file structure just gets wacked. and the drive can't function right. I'm not claming this is your problem but if you have qa place to move the data to it can't hurt to try.

I might try that out, thanks for the suggestion!
Won't be using it as a primary drive on my laptop anymore though, ssd is already ordered (an OCZ agility 3, looked like a good buy if I remember the reviews of it, certainly at its price). Still can't believe how much prices on memory sticks dropped the last few years. Got 4 gig of so-dimm kingston hyper x (pc2 6400 CL4), which should be a nice upgrade from the previous 2gb pc2 5300, and it's going to cost me ~50€.