computer suddenly won't boot, "Verifying DMI Data Pool" is the last thing i see

yesterday i came home to the same thing, but last night it booted fine.
today while i was away it must have crashed, i came home to see the same thing...only this time after a few minutes it says "Disk boot failure"

it checks ram and posts ok, even picks up the hard drive when its booting...just doesn't load windows

does this mean my hard drive went bad??

specs - xp1800, gigabyte ga7dx mobo
hard drive is a WD 30gig (refurb)

 

[WarCon]

See if you can get WD's diagnostics on floppy. Here is a link.

 

no floppy drive in my system

 

hmmm...could i burn that to a cd, and boot from the cd?