Hard Disk issue with Toshiba Satellite P755-S5390

Question

Well, I'm at my wit's end on this one so after several months of searching for an answer I'm presenting this one to my fellow Toshiba users.
I have a Toshiba Satellite P755  that I purchased around March of 2012 so it is well out of warranty unfortunately. I'm having an odd issue that could just be a faulty hard drive but I wanted to see if anyone had any similar experiences with their Toshibas that might lead this to be a recurring issue with other Toshibas.
The first symptoms my laptop experienced were the computer locking up and the hard drive light staying lit constantly. This first happened right after I was using WIn 7 disk management to shrink the main partition so I could create a second partition. The exact step this happened at was when I had already shrunk the main partition and had just finished creating the second partition. It hadn't even refreshed the disk management screen when it just locked up completely.
I left it locked up for almost a half hour and then did a forced shutdown and when it came back up it was really slow and the hard drive light was staying lit constantly. Eventually it wouldn't even start up and the drive light still stayed on constantly (not even blinking, just solid on).
My first thought was obviously hard disk failure so I grabbed a spare that should have worked perfectly as it was just harvested from a perfectly fine little netbook. I popped the drive in and reinstalled Win 7 and it worked fine...for a few weeks. Then it did the exact same thing except this time it eventually just wouldn't recognize any boot media. I cursed my bad luck in having two failed hard drives and used an older one that I had spare that, as I recall, worked fine when I harvested it from the old laptop it came out of. It worked again...for a couple of days. Then it did the same thing as the first (hard drive light staying lit, not responding hardly at all). I even hooked all these little laptop hard drives up to my file servers SATA ports and they loaded fine and I was able to back stuff up.
My dilemma here is that I know it could just be that I was using old hard drives and maybe by some chance they all failed because they were old but I'd hate to buy a new hard drive if that's not the problem.
Has anyone had any similar experiences with their Toshibas? I even tried testing the RAM and even removing one module at a time. I also tried pulling the battery and running it straight from the charger thinking maybe it was shorting something out.
As an additional note. One interesting thing that happened after the third drive went bad was that I plugged in the original hard drive thinking I could further troubleshoot and it worked perfectly fine for about a month. It then proceeded to do the same thing again. That's about where I am now. The only other thing I did was yesterday when I pulled the battery and tried it. It did respond very well for at least long enough to almost finish the reinstall to factory partitions but it failed at the last minute and rebooted. It then loaded the Windows startup screen and locked up with the hard drive light staying lit solid.
Sorry for the novel but I wanted to make sure all my troubleshooting steps were documented so no one suggested those. My last step is to pop in another used drive and install Ubuntu and see what happens then.
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Answer 1

Satellite P755-S5390 Specifications
Satellite P755-S5390 Support Page
justinmbarnes wrote:....I popped the drive in and reinstalled Win 7 and it worked fine...for a few weeks.
How did you reinstall Win 7 on the replacement drive?  Did you use the the Toshiba Recovery Disks you should have created as per the directions on page 74 of your User's Guide, following the recovery directions on page 76, and return your unit to its factory default out-of-the-box setup? What happens if you return your unit to its factory default set up? This is considered the gold standard test on whether you have a hardware problem/failure, as opposed to a driver-software-conflict problem.
You seem quite familiar with Windows Disk Management software, yet you don't mention running the built in disk 'Error-checking' utility.
If you believe you may be suffering from some kind of hard drive problems, this would seem a logical step. You can access this utility by clicking on 'Start' -> click on 'Computer' -> right click on 'C:' drive -> click on 'Properties' -> click on the 'Tools' tab -> under 'Error-checking' click the 'Check now...' button -> put check marks on both the 'Automatically fix....' and 'Scan for...' options -> click the 'Start' button. The utility will inform you it can't be run now and ask if you want to schedule for the next restart, agree and restart your computer. Depending on the size of your hard drive and the problems the utility may encounter this could take from 20 minutes to several hours.
Let us know what happens. Good luck.
Mike