eMachines netbook 250-1162 HDD failing

A friend gave me a netbook the one in title and I believe the sata hdd is failing, I just need some reassurance. The computer is just majorly slow, done some researching on the board and found out if the drive fails to spin up so many times it will put it in POI-I mode or something like and cause the data transfer to be extremely slow. When the computer FINALLY does turn on takes an hour sometimes no joke nothing will load. Acts like its frozen, after a while of letting it sit and do its thing I can slowly start opening stuff and it starts to speed up. I've defragged, ran chkdsk, and startup repair and everything I could think of and no luck. Is the drive failing ?

I forgot to mention I had to reinstall windows 7. It originally had windows 7 starter and I put home premium on it. Took me forever to get it to install. I had to run clean in cmd from the RE and finally got it to let me install. Can't get it to accept the original key I'm assuming cause I didn't do the upgrade. I'll check real quick the version of the hdd.

Ah gotcha, Ty Golden. The hdd is a Western Digital Scorpio Blue sata model WD2500BEVT-22A23T0. I have no clue if the previous owner ever dropped it or not.

Now got something new when I was tryin to do startup repair. "the instruction at 0x743F8F18 referenced memory at 0x00000004. The memory could not be read. What's this problem related to?

I doubt this would be much use to you, but I have googled the errors, and 0x00000004 memory error is usually related to damaged or corrupted system files, therefore you may want to check the Event Viewer for any additional information.

Hope this helps kinda (: