Laptop hardrive

My laptop's hard drive is now playing up and when I run chkdsk it list many unreadable areas. I tried creating recovery discs (4 in total) since the ones I created when I got the laptop I can't find (after moving houses) but after the first disc has been created system stop responding. I have a couple of questions if anyone can help

1. Is there another way I can create those discs

2. If I bought a new hard, without the recovery discs does that mean I need to also buy new windows 7 OS.

Thank you.

If you have backups (I'm assuming Windows system images), buy a new hard disk, install Windows and then create a recovery disk. If you have an OEM system with no Windows CD, you will probably have to ask someone else to create a recovery disk for you (e.g. the shop you bought it from). Alternatively, ask a computer store to do it all for you.