when I turn my computer on and it boots up (win7, no more ubuntu for now) the screen stays black and it says "disk error: press any key to restart" I hope my HDD isn't dead.. I'm zeroing everything out on it right now..

Sorry if I'm a bit vague, pulled an all nighter messin' with this thing.

Anyway, is there any hope for my hard drive?

Is this a windows laptop or Mac?

What happened when you rebooted?

It's a Winblows machine.

Is it zeroing the disk without error? Do you have any third party diagnostic/repair utilities?

Yes no errors.
It seems to be working for now, but I dont have anything like disk warrior to check if anythings really wrong

It could have been some directory damage/corruption that the zeroing and reinstall would have fixed.

Well let's hope it stays this way.

There is Norton 360, which if you have purchased you can make a bootable CD from to make a DiskDoctor/Utilities Disk.

But for free you can get a bootable UBCD from here. It has an ISO download torrent link under P2P. You must make a CD from the ISO. Win 7 does that without anything extra.

The stupid Ultimate Boot CD or Ultimate PC Repair CD ads in the yellow box with the green Download button are for buy, it's not the Hiren's download.

UBCD has quite few free utilities;

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

You can also get this http://www.ubcd4win.com/ which boots to a desktop and GUI rather than the Terminal type window.

There's also http://www.hirensbootcd.org/download/ scroll down for the download link. Watch for the stupid yellow ads here too, it's not the Download link you want.