Laptop Hardware Problems

I have a Dell laptop that, until now, has treated me well for almost 2 years. Sometimes when starting up, some BIOS screen appears stating that it cannot detect any boot disks. Clearly, the hard drive is still installed, but is not recognized. Also, the infamous blue screen of death has randomly appeared several times over the past few weeks. Recent thoughts run across my mind about losing all of my invaluable data. Thankfully, I use MozyHome for backing up the essentials, although I've never restored files with MozyHome. That makes me nervous. The errors from the blue screen of death made me suspect that either the RAM is bad or Windows has been corrupted. So, after searching the error messages through the developers best friend, Google, I found that it could either be corrupted Windows files, a virus, bad RAM, or hard drive problem.

Now, I ordered the RAM from Crucial a few months ago. So, while it may not be logical, I don't think its the RAM. The main suspect is the hard drive. This is because if it was a Windows file corruption I would expect the errors to be more consistent. While that may be giving Windows more credit to consistency than it deserves, I'm no expert and thus I have to follow my gut.

Another reason why I suspect the hard drive is due to some heat generation. Last night I started up the laptop and it worked fine. So I was able to backup everything I needed onto a flash drive. But I noticed that after a few minutes, the hard drive was hot! At first I thought it was the battery. After checking it I confirmed it to be the hard drive! I shutdown the laptop and pulled out the hard drive and it was almost too hot to handle. That just doesn't seem right.

I'll first try replacing the hard drive. Dell sells them for about $125. The problem is I can't find my Windows XP disks to reinstall Windows if I get a new hard drive. But I could just buy some disks, or borrow someone elses. I still have my product key. More to come as the saga continues.