With laptops, the most common cause of startup errors like you are encountering are because of the "SMART" IDE self check. Laptops get banged around often and unless you are very careful with you stuff the drives go out pretty regularly. You can get into the bios to disable that annoying F1 error but your drive is going to fail so you may want to back it up first. You can save alot of headache by buying the new drive now and using norton ghost to make an exact image of your old drive so that you wont have to do any reloading or driver searching.