Perhaps a hd problem???

This question is in regards to my wife's hp pavillion zv5000 laptop. A few weeks ago the machine would just freeze up on her. She would reboot and it would work. I eventually got to the machine and had similar problems, but would sometimes get a blue screen as well.

Eventually the machine just died. It claimed to not be able to find system files and the hd was making noises.

The machine sat for a week or two, and when I would boot it the sounds were no longer present. I was able to do a repair and started to look in the event logs.

Here is what I found and wanted to get any input. I feel it may be a hardware problem but won't rule out software. I will say we did virus scan the box and it is clear. It is running WinXP SP2 with all updates.

First error I notice is a Save Dump

bug check was 0x0000007a (0xc03dd9a4, 0xc000000e, 0xf7669130, 0x0737e860)

I then noticed two minutes after this an error from atapi. The error is The device .\Device\Ide\IdePort0, did not respond within the timeout period.

This error occured several times over the next few days. This is when she was getting the sytem freezes I believe.

The last event of note is a warning from disk that states: An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk0\D during a paging operation. The D: drive is a dvd drive. There is a chance there was a disk in the machine during this period.

Following the event are two more atapi errors like the above one, and that is the last of it.

Any opinions? The machine currently is running fine. I may just let it run over the next week or so. I already grabbed all the data from the machine that I thought we had lost.

The machine is under warranty but the company refuses to believe it is a hardware problem. As I said the hd was making noises at the time of these problems, and was getting worse as the problem got worse, but now all seems corrected.

Thanks in advance with any help.