Hi Ron,
Could you tell us all a little more about the message that appeared?
First thing to eliminate is whether it is simply a piece of malware that produced
a bogus message or whether the hard drive really is beginning to fail and the
message is legitimate.
If it the hard drive that is failing, then it will be covered under warranty.
Is this a desktop or a laptop?
The not so good news is that when disks are sent away under warranty, they
won't be repaired and sent back to you. You will simply receive a replacement.
Since you don't have a copy of the OS on DVD, it sounds like you may have a laptop.
These days most come with an installation image preloaded on the disk.
You could backup to DVD but you would probably need a very large number of them.
A better option is to purchase an external DVD drive that has USB connect.
Since the floods in Thailand where some of the major hard disk manufacturing
plants were damaged, the price of drives has been going up but you should
still be able to purchase an external 1TB drive for anywhere between $99 and $160.
Even our local Post Office sells them these days.
If it is simply a bogus message from a piece of malware, I would recommend
you download a copy of Microsoft Security Essentials and run a full scan.
It is free from here
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/w...ity-essentials
By exploring the system logs that accessible from the Control Panel, we should be able to walk
you through to check whether the OS has been legitimately logging hard disk errors.
To prepare yourself for trying to get a system image to backup, also read this -
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-AU/w...ings-and-files