Windows 7 won't boot, even to safe mode: (0x00000074 - BAD_SYSTEM_CONFIG_INFO)

My friend has a Dell Inspiron 1545 that is a few years old now. It came with Windows 7 64-bit. The original hard drive started to go bad around four or five months ago, so I replaced it with another one that had a high rating on Newegg, re-installed Windows 7 64-bit, put as much of my friend's data as I could get from the old drive onto the new one, and encrypted the entire drive with TrueCrypt.

My friend told me that he recently started the laptop and got a message saying that it wasn't shut down properly, though he claims that he didn't shut it down improperly. The laptop still worked, though. But then the next time he tried to use it, it wouldn't boot. Instead, it gave the BSOD in this post's title. I tried getting into safe mode, but it didn't work. I ran Dell's on-board diagnostics and got this message:

Error Code  0146.
Msg: Error Code 2000-0146
Msg: Hard Drive 0 - self test log contains previous error(s)
The given error code and message can be used by Dell Technical Support to help diagnose the problem.
Do you want to continue testing?

Everything else in the diagnostics looked good, though. I didn't see anywhere in the BIOS that I could access the self test log. I kind of wonder if the tool is just having issues since the entire drive is encrypted. I would doubt that a drive would go bad so quickly—especially if it's rated so well.

I'd obviously like to avoid a full re-install if I can. If I must re-install, then I'd at least like to figure out what caused this so that I can prevent it from happening again. I already connected the drive to my desktop computer to check out the mini dump, but the only mini dump there was had a modified date of about two months ago.

Is there anything I can do to fix this or at least find out what caused this? Any help would be much appreciated. Thank you!