Much to my dismay, my new XPS 8700 is reporting imminent hard drive failure and advised to back up and send for a new one. It is making strange sounds, very disappointing.

Anyhow when I open dell backup and recovery it pretty much bugs me to upgrade to the full version, I finally got to a tab when it looked like I could back up, but it couldn't see my backup drive.

I installed a seagate program, it started backing up but seems to be hung up at 7% so I'm not sure what to do here. Would like to do a disc image so I don't have to reinstall everything, but what if this thing won't back up at all do to whatever problem its having ?

since dell doesn't ship discs anymore, would I be generally screwed and left to buy an OS on my own ?