unrecoverable error - what do I do now?

I installed XP at the end of July 2003 - things were great until this weekend when I came down to find an error message saying that I had too many bad blocks on the hard drive and that I should run a disk utility to mark them and move any data that could be saved.

This message came from GoBack 3.0 that came with my Symantec SytemWorks 2003. NDD seemed to hang so I tried running chkdsk and after it got to 33% it came up with the message about "unrecoverable errors" and now my system won't boot, it just gets so far and then restarts itself.

Should I just plan to reformat and reinstall everything? Can I save any data in any way? Is it possible my HDD (recently purchased in March 2003) is going bad?

If weren't already mostly bald I would be loosing much hair over this...please can anyone help shed some light on my options?

Thanks, Eric

 

Boot to the XP CD, start a new install, hit F8 to agree to the TOS, and at the next screen hit "R" to "repair a current installation... ".
During the install process, XP will scan the drive, mark the bad sectors, attempt recovery of data, and rewrite the OS over top of itself. You should get it all back, then backup everything you need, and get warranty on that drive. It's obviously going to die very soon.