Is my HHD failing?

I have noticed for the last couple of weeks, each time I turne this laptop on, the HHD monitoring light blinks and stay on then blinks and this goes on for over 15 minutes. Now I have a nother laptop (HP), 4 tower computers, and I don't see this problem. At first I thought I had a lot of programs running in background so I went to msconfig then to start programs and shut down just about everything, applied and rebooted. and I still have the same problem. Now while this is happening the touchpad pointer ( mouse) freezes then it goes wild. I checked for malware, adwares viruses and I still have the same problem. Could it be that the drive is failing?
This is my system here. Hope I posted the right place. Thanks in advance.


OS Name Microsoft Windows XP Professional
Version 5.1.2600 Service Pack 3 Build 2600
OS Manufacturer Microsoft Corporation
System Name HOME-46F595DE04
System Manufacturer TOSHIBA
System Model Satellite A25
System Type X86-based PC
Processor x86 Family 15 Model 2 Stepping 9 GenuineIntel ~2656 Mhz
BIOS Version/Date TOSHIBA Version 1.10, 5/19/2003
SMBIOS Version 2.3
Windows Directory C:\WINDOWS
System Directory C:\WINDOWS\system32
Boot Device \Device\HarddiskVolume1
Locale United States
Hardware Abstraction Layer Version = "5.1.2600.5512 (xpsp.080413-2111) "
User Name HOME-46F595DE04\Dun
Time Zone Eastern Standard Time
Total Physical Memory 768.00 MB
Available Physical Memory 299.78 MB
Total Virtual Memory 2.00 GB
Available Virtual Memory 1.96 GB
Page File Space 1.38 GB
Page File C:\pagefile.sys

 

Thanks PeteC, you have furnished me with some great links to work with. I will post back with results.
Thanks again.

 

I said I would report back of my progress. I took the HHD out of the laptop and indeed it is a Toshiba drive. I did go to their website but they do not have a drive diagnostic software on their site. They do encourage you to send the HHD in to them. I can't do that because this is a used computer bought at a computer show in NY and it comes with no papaers. I do build my own computers and configure them so with the limited knowledge that I have in this field, I really believe that the drive is very sluggish and failing. I did as much cleaning up of the drive as possible, run diskeeper and other things to aliviate the problems and it still grind and grind for long periods. My next step will be to order a drive from Microcenter or one of those places.
Thanks for your help.