BlueScreen- Hard Drive failing?

I'm fairly cetain that my HD is failing, but I wanted to check with the experts to see if there could be a software issue.

I am receiving a "BlueScreen" error on start-up, immediately after the scrolling green loading bar:

http://img515.imageshack.us/img515/4950/dscf2510xw6.th.jpg

I built this system about 9 months ago and since building it I have received this error about 4 times while the computer was running (already booted up). However, about a week ago this started happening on start-up and has happened almost every day since then, once it happened three times and today it happened 5 before it started up.

Trying to boot up in Safe Mode doesn't seem to make a difference one way or another, but it will eventually boot up properly. I don't recall any real significant changes made in the time frame when this started happening.

My goal is to maintain my data; all family photos are stored on this HD (separate partition) with only some backed up (I will try to back them all up).

So, is this my HD failing, a software issue, a virus floating around, or something else altogether. If its a:

-HD Failure: is putting another one on and syncing them with RAID the best option? (If so is there a good tutorial on this site?)
-Software issue: how do I fix it?
-A Virus: I haven't been able to find it using your tools, so how do I remove it?


If it helps, here is the recovery notice given by Windows (scrolled down in the second one):

http://img222.imageshack.us/img222/2980/dscf2521io0.th.jpg
http://img227.imageshack.us/img227/4480/dscf2522fg4.th.jpg

Let me know if there is any other information you need.

Thanks in advance for any assistance.

weberms


Vista Home Premium 64 SP1
AMD Phenom 9850 Quad-Core 2.51 GHz
4x2Gb Memory
Samsung HD753LJ ATA 750Gb HD
NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT