OT: Pin-pointing Hard Drive Failure

My 2001 laptop (Sony GR370) has been on the fritz lately. It doesn't sit
on a desk all the time, and is carried around a lot in a backpack.

For the past few weeks, it has been crapping out on me. It makes a sound
like a huge capacitor is being quickly drained, then Linux prints the
following (if I'm lucky):
hda: status timeout: status=0x80 { Busy }
hda: DMA disabled
hda: drive not ready for command
ide0: reset: success
at which point I'm up and running and still working.

Other times, Linux will print out all but the last line, then will print
out various I/O error messages as well as ext3 failures. I've seen this
type of message before, and it usually means that one pulled out an IDE
drive of a running system.

I'm going to pin this down to an overworked, jostled too-much harddrive,
and buy a new one. Before i spend the money on a new laptop hard drive,
I was wondering If anybody on this list has seen or had similar problems
with their laptop and is there anything else i can try or look into
before plopping down the money for a new drive?