Is my hard drive about to die?

I just got an XPS 1730 in May, and in addition to the problems I've been having with it, I am afraid my hard drive might be on the way out.

I have been pelted with BSOD's for a while but have assumed most of them have had to do with drivers (I haven't had a chance to reformat or anything yet), but I got one the other day that read:

"A process thread crucial to system operation has been unexpectedly exited or been terminated.

STOP 0x000000F4 (0x00000003,0x8A248280, 0x8A2483F4, 0x805D13B6)"

From what I could gather on the internet, an F4 STOP could mean hard drive issues.

Then, just last night, I turned my computer on and after the Dell screen I heard a loud "beep" (I assume from the motherboard? It was from inside the computer) and that was it - I had manually turn the computer off.

This morning when I turned it back on, it went through the error reporting process, and the Windows Error Reporting page it took me to said that my error report was corrupt, and that that usually indicates a "serious problem with my computer" - all of the previous error reports I've sent have indicated a driver issue.

I will be backing up my data today, and I'll be sending my computer back to Dell for repair eventually for the other problems - I'm just curious to know what you guys think.

Thanks for your help!

 

You should definitely back up your data; thats priority number one.

With regards to the STOP error, it could be the SATA driver, hard disk, or a possible memory problem. Try checking for disk errors using CHKDSK and memory problems with memtest86+ or Vista's built-in tool (Start > search "memory").