Failing hard drive?
 

About a week ago, my computer got the Blue Screen of Death and crashed. It was trying to do some memory dump, but never worked.

Rebooted the computer and I notice that either the programs didn't work or it was lagging. I did the Windows Error scanning that scans my hard drive. It found a bunch of errors and fixed some. But it always gets stuck at 98% at stage 4 of 5.

Does this mean my hard drive is dying? Or will a hard reformat fix it?

try to download Hirens BootCD 9.5 burn it,than boot it and use HDD Regenerator.its great program to fix bad sector.helpfully will fix your problem

That seems indicative of a failing drive. When hard disks start to go bad, it's never a good idea to rely on it any longer than you should.

I recommend the use of SpinRite 6. Run your hard disk through it, grab as much as you can off the drive, and ditch it once you're through.

Damn. At least Windows runs and everything. Better get my stuff all backed up.

It's a Dell Dimension 4600, about five years old.

Do you guys think this is a good replacement? I honestly don't need a very big hard drive.
Newegg.com - Western Digital Caviar SE WD800JB 80GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache IDE Ultra ATA100 Hard Drive - Internal Hard Drives

80GB for $40? You'd be getting a much better deal by buying a 500 gig instead. You get 420GB more for merely double what the 80GB drive costs.

Newegg.com - Western Digital Caviar GP WD5000AACS 500GB 5400 to 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - Internal Hard Drives

Basil, your HD is SATA while his is IDE. I doubt many computers that are 5 years old (especially a Dell workstation) would have expansion slots for SATA connections.

That said, you can still get a 320GB IDE drive for $80 off of Newegg. Newegg.com - ide hard drive, $75 - $100 Since they're all the same price, be sure to get one that's got a 16MB cache instead of an 8MB one, too. So, either go for the first Seagate one listed there, or the first one that's in a retail box.