Inspiron 1501 Create restore disc help

Hi

Have a Inspiron 1501 laptop running Windows Vista that the hard drive is flaging up bad clusters on when ever I do a scan, at the moment the system still seems to work fine but I am concerend the hard drive is on its way out so want to replace.

Have backed up all my document etc to be safe however I have a couple of problems.

Problem 1: obveously the hard drive I will replace with a brand new one and it will be blank so I have to load OS on it somehow, by CD / DVD is the only option here.

Problem 2: the laptop did not come with any recovery CDs / DVDs but has a recovery partition on the current (failing) hard disc, how do I create a recovery CD / DVD set ?

The laptop DOES NOT have "Dell DataSafe Local Backup 2.0" or infact any other utility to create a restore disc set, all I have is the full system restore function under F8 at boot up and the usual back up under system tools, it will not create discs and  this is pointless on a failing hard disc.

Obveously its POINTLESS me restoring (from this F8 menu) the system on my current hard disc as its flaging up errors and I have no means of using the "Recover Partioion" on this drive to create a restore disc / CD set that I can then use to load OS on my new replacement hard drive.

I'm hopefull that the recovery partioin area of the drive is damage free (as its technicaly not been used other than for the recovery stuff) so creating a "restore CD set" should work maybe and would be worth a try but I can't as I don't have the option to, catch 22 !!!!!

Anyone out there or even DELL have any idea on how I can reinstall my OS on a new hard drive.

Laptop been ad good as gold up untill now so really want to solve this.

The fact is I should be allowed to create a restore disc set of my Pre Installed OS which I paid for in the price of the laptop, if the oringal hard drive did die I would be up sxxts creek without a padel as I would have no way to obtain / reload the operating system I paid for.

Can anyone point me in the direction to download "Dell DataSafe local backup 2.0" as from google it seems to be the answer and would it work to create a restore disc set from the recovery partition ?

Any help would be great.