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Hi PlanningToLive,
I'm a certified Computer Tech. We always said there are two kinds of hard drives. Those that haven't failed and those that are going to fail. It's like a car. A hard drive is actually mechanical. It does have metal parts and it will fail eventually. You are one of the lucky ones and you received a warning. Back it up now.
Regarding your drivers, as long as you have a driver for your cd rom and a driver for your nic (network interface card) you can connect to the internet and download the rest. If you connect via modem instead of a network card, you'll need that driver instead of the nic driver. But if your pc came with cd's, chances are there are drivers for the cd rom, the nic, the extra apps, a modem if there is one, a driver for a sound card and/or a video card if there are any separate from the motherboard, plus your operating system.
The kind of hard drive your pc will accept depends on the motherboard, the processor and the bus speed. I would shoot to replace it with an identical one. If you back it up, you can take it out and take it with you to a store and they will give you one like it. There is a sticker on it that says what it is, i.e. speed, size, ATA or SATA, etc.
If you have the Windows operating system disc from your current pc all you have to do is put the cd in the tray, boot and let the system disc boot up. (If it's not set to boot first from the cd, reboot and hit F10 and change it to boot from cd first.) It will format your new drive for you and do everything you need to do. You don't need to mess with anything else. Windows makes it easy for you.
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 Vickie
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