[ubuntu] Windows 7 Ubuntu dual boot screw up?

Hello all,
So a colleague of mine was hoping to set up a windows 7 and Ubuntu dual boot on his Dell Inspiron N7010. He's hoping to do some Unix scripting and decided this was the best approach. He asked me to help him with the install, which I did, and I'm now conceed that I may have bricked his computer.

He's ruing Windows 7, so I partitioned the harddrive and allocated ~150Gb to the new partition. Then I downloaded the latest ubuntu .iso file, downloaded the universal USB installer found here:Universal USB Installer – Easy as 1 2 3 | USB Pen Drive Linux

and used it to mount the .iso file on to the partition I had just created with the option to format the drive tued on.

Seemed to perform the mount fine, but upon tuing the system off and tuing it back on the entire computer is booting to a black screen with a flashing underscore cursor in the top left coer. Booting to BIOS and ruing diagnostics gives me the error code 2000-0146. I did some googling and this seems to indicate a failure of the harddrive at some level. At this point I'm conceed I've bricked my co-workers computer and theres no way to fix this.Do any of you have any insight?