chkdsk does not show promising results
 

So my mom's lap top just shat its pants, and refused to respond to any input command, until it finally let me hard reboot (all it would do was go to sleep on all my prior attempts) I finally got it into safemode and ran chkdsk from the command prompt. The results were as follows

The Bitmap volume is incorrect
Windows found problems with the file system

i tried running chkdsk/f which is supposed to fix these problems, but it told me that it couldn't run that, as the volume is being used by another process.

My sister's boyfriend, who is a professional tech, tells me that the hard drive is on its way out, and i probably only have one more boot left before it dies entirely. Has anyone else seen this before?

If you want to do the chkdsk route to try and repair the system, you'll need to boot from your Windows CD into the repair console (I'd give directions, but I don't know if it's any different for Vista/7 from XP).

If you want to be extra safe, it wouldn't be a bad idea to first take that drive out of the computer, put it in an external enclosure, and move any important data onto another computer.

I've managed to get all the files i think are important off the computer onto a flash drive, and i'm waiting for my mom to get home so i can get her opinion on what she will need/want off of it to begin with. I don't have the tools necessary to do the enclosure strategy, but if my suspicions are confirmed, i may need a new hard drive all together.