Hard Drive issues... no idea what to do...

You can use a hard drive testing utility from the hard drive manufacturer's web site.

But you haven't filled out your system specs, so we have no idea who made any of your hardware.

If you get a new drive, you can consider any of these 3 things:

1: Clean install to the new drive
2: Clone from the bad drive to the new drive
3: Make an image of the bad drive, store that image temporarily on the external, and then restore the image from the external to the new drive.

A clean install is always preferable if you are willing to take the time to do it.

You should back up your personal data first, regardless.

Go to the Western Digital web site and download and run their hard drive utility. If it fails the test, you likely need a new hard drive. If it passes, you likely have some other problems.

I'm not sure what you mean by "ghosting".

The risk of cloning or imaging is that they won't work properly and you would then face trouble-shooting issues--which may be more of a hassle than a clean install.

If your hard drive is bad, you can try a clone or an image restoration, but if that doesn't work well, at what point do you throw in the towel and do a clean install? That's for you to decide.

Cloning and imaging are different processes and either might work. Cloning is generally used when things are going well and you just want to move to a new hard drive. Imaging is normally used when things have gone bad and you want to recover to a known good state. Imaging is a backup strategy. Cloning is not. The premise of imaging is to make an image of your system WHEN ALL IS WELL and then restore it in an emergency. You didn't make an image when all is well, so it's anybody's guess if imaging will resolve your problems. And both imaging and cloning can fail even in the best of circumstances.

Test your hard drive.

Seems like i'm getting nothing but trouble! The WD diagnostics for my hard drive apparently will not run on a standard SATA drives as is told by Axoltol's first post here: Hard Drive error? - Hard-Disks - Storage
So what should I run diagnostics wise? They recommend some sort of SeaTools diagnostic on the forum I linked, but I'm not too sure about it.

I cant actually access my OS right now. Instead I used my good ol Paragon Rescue Kit disk. Comes in handy all the time, but I will check when I have the chance.

What I meant was that I did try it, so I have no idea what I should use.