Annoying partition issues on old Dell

[RefractedAhav]

So here's the problem. I recently bought a Dell Dimension 5150 w/o a hdd from work for $15. My dad supplied me with his sata hdd. That's cool, however non of the images on the hdd work properly. before Fedora would partially load then quit, now it loads but it has the sad computer screen behind the login box and non of the logins seem to work. I tried replacing all of the OS's on the drive with A/V linux v. 6, but the partitioning utilitie in the installer does not support virtual partitions. Then I tried using Linux mint to have the partition table created automagically but keep getting this stupid grub error 22. I looked it up and it found out this supposedly means that a partition has been deleted. I just checked on my laptop, and the image on the USB still works . Any one have any idea why this old Dell has so much trouble with partitions created on other machines ? Oh both linux mint 14 and a/v linux 6 were installed to USB using the same version of unetbootin. a/v linux still loads on the dell the last I checked.

[Mithrandir]

Do you have access to serious disk checker like SpinRite? It's cleared up several hard-to-diagnose drive errors for me.