Help appreciated: repeated hard drive failure on Inspiron 6000

Hello all,

Starting around last week, after using the systems for a while and usually when making a hard drive read (hypothetical), the OS gets a fatal error, laptop reboots, and I get the Read failure on internal hard drive.

I have been using my laptop for more than 3.5 years and though always doing computationally intensive work, have never experienced problems as bad as this.

I'm guessing that the hard drive has reached its limit. The first time that this occurred was two weeks ago, when I was installing a windows update, the system reports a fatal error, and I simply restarted a few times and everything returns to normal. Last week however, when I was starting Visual Studio 2005 the boot sector became corrupt it never recovered, and by using the linux and windows setup cds I could see that my partitions are still there, but are listed as empty. And when it happened again today, it recovered by itself again after I left it turned off for a while. However, I'm not a ECE major and not completely knowledgeable about hardware so I wonder if any one could help me find out what's actually going on.

I'm thinking about buying a new hard disk, but since I am not reasonably positive whether this is a hard drive issue I don't want to spend the money not reassured to some degree that is the solution.

Any pointers, suggestions will be appreciated, thanks in advance.