vw151

If you even suspect that your drive is going bad I'd move the data to another drive or DVD asap if the data is important.

Having said that. I'd download WD diag (since you have wester digital drives) and make the bootable floppy and run the HDD tests to see what the health of your drive actually is. After that, if it passes with no problems and you feel like reformatting and reloading your OS then I'd run the "write zeros to drive" process and then format it and start over. It might be overkill but that will insure that your MBR and everything is written correctly as it wipes everything on the drive corrupt or not.

Before testing back your data up though as the tests are pretty exhaustive and could break something if it's on it's way to dead.