Problem with Hard Disk Drive

Afternoon all,

My computer was running a little slow this morning. After lunch it went into meltdown and started a DiskRepair. I have run a defragmentation and this has found:

Read time of hard drive clusters less than 500 ms
40 % of HDD space is unreadable
Hard drive doesn't respond to system commands
Bad sectors on hard drive or damaged file allocation table
Boot sector of the hard disk drive is damaged


These are all critical errors and via the Diskrepair programme I can go to a Microsoft website where I can pay 50 quid for presumable somthing to fix the problem. But I want to understand it. I would be extremely grateful if anyone could help tell me what is the problem (as you may have guessed by now, I am not a computer wizz)and if/how I can fix it myself. My operating system is Windows XP Professional and I have 2 Gig RAM.

Thanks in advance,

Ben

 

Etaf,

Would a power supply issue, not getting enough power to perform tasks cause this?