You do need a replacement drive.  Contact Dell support with the error - they'll send you a drive;  the hard drive is customer-replaceable.

Case you got some precious data on the disk - put it in a external USB2.0 enclosure and access it from a different computer

When it's unreadable, try Partition Recovery to repair the MBR / Partition Table and rebuild the file list.

Copy it to a different disk, never write on disk with write failures.

Thank you for that advice, but I'm ok with losing my data and plus, the really important files that can't be downloaded again are on another computer, and a fresh start would probably increase performance.

W.O.W a 1545 that already had a drive failer. Was it a Western Digital drive? I am wondering something when dell ship out replacemeant drives to customers is the OS installed and all the dell partitions? The diag and recovery? I had a Gateway once and had a drive replaced. Gateway sent the drive and when I put it in and turned on the computer XP setup began without even useing my disk. Another way to get important info is to use a live linux CD boot to it connect an external

HDD and get the data off that way if possible.

Thank you. I've called Dell today and they've dispatched my replacement. I should have it by Tuesday or Wednesday

yeah. I haven't even had it for 5 months. As for the replacement contents, i don't know whether or not dell bothers to  do that but i will find out in 2-3 business days when I come home from school and install the HDD.

The new drive will arrive blank - though it should be possible to request a pre-loaded replacement drive.

ok, so that means that i have to install Vista Home Premium when the Hard Drive is installed, yes?