Blue error screen - does it mean my hard-drive is failing?

Hi,

I use an Acer Ferrari 3400 laptop, 2 years old. On the weekend I experienced the dreaded 'blue screen' error page, saying something about Kernel_stack_inpage_error. It mentioned that I should back-up my data (which I did) as it could be a hard-drive problem and then it performed a physical memory dump.

I restarted and after another 5mins got the same error page. So I decided to restore / format the computer using a the system CD's which restored the C: to the factory settings. This still didn't solve my problem, so I tried to format it again at which point during the process it told me that there was a bad sector found and couldn't continue. What does a bad sector mean? Am I going to need a new computer or can you simply change the hard-drive?

I have recently installed new RAM and I thought this may be the cause, but I checked this with a computer shop over the weekend and they said the one I bought was compatible and working fine.

Can someone please advise what they would do in my situation?

Thanks

Thanks for the reply!

I have taken a look at the www.memtest.org site and there are 3 downloadable files. Should I download and use the first one (ISO)? So simply burn iso to cd and then boot up my laptop with the cd in order to fix any bad ram errors?