Vista - a disk read error occured press ctrl alt delete

hi, i have a new hp pavillion laptop it's not even a year old. lately it has been very slow and frezzeing on me. i've had to manualy shut it off sevral times. after i shut it down manually and then turned it back on it will either frezze on the black screen. or it will say A disk read error occured press control alt delete to restart. sometimes though it will get to a screen that says somthing about windows haveing a problem and to run a fixing program. i did it once a box poped up saying it was trying to fix the problem. 30 minutes later it was done and my computer worked but then froze again and went back to the same old. it now will display the disk read error and i did get to the windows repair thing but it just froze on a black screen. one thing that it did do today was it had a message saying an external hard drive or usb drive was removed wrong and said to replace it and restart windows. i remeber eairer in the week i removed my flash drive and it said i removed it wrong which i never get on my computer. if anyone can help me please i'm running vista. i just want to be able to get my computer back to normal with all my files on it.

I would backup your data. Sounds like a bad hard drive. You could try chkdsk c:/r after you are done backing up.

this might sound like a stupid question but how would i back up my data?

Use Vista's file backup Utility. Set the location for backup to either multiple dvd'd or external drive. (it will be approx 20GB+ in size the first time)

Start>Control Panel>System and Maintenance>Backup and Restore Center>Backup files on your entire computer (check ALL boxes)

my the computer starts i pressed f10 which brings you into system info stuff but i went to diagnostics and did a primary hard disk self test the test took only 5 minutes and it said the hard disk needed to be replaced. i then did the same test on the secondary hard disk and that took 45 minutes and it is fine. i'm guessing this might be the problem is there anyway to fix it or some way to get around it?

If you have RAID, you will have to reinstall

I suggest you use this to image the bad disk, remove it, and use the good disk as your primary. reimage it from the other disk, and your back to normal. then simply buy another drive and use it as the secondary (slave).
Drive Backup Express - Free Download!

ok ill try that but how will i do it on my computer if i can't get to my computer or the internet? and will i still have all my files?

Well In that case, switch the hdds and re-install. then pull the data off the bad drive (if that cannot be done, chances are the data may be unretrievable)

sorry to ask this but how do i switch the hdds and reinstall it?

i do have access to other computers (obviously) if there is a way to burn something onto a disk that might work??