[Hampshire] Dead/Dying HDD

Hello,

So, it's the night before I have to give a presentation (which I was
working on) and the Hard Drive on my laptop appears to have decided that now
is a good time to die. I have an Advent 7027 running Windows XP SP1 and
Kubuntu 6.06 in dual boot.
The symptoms under windows are random BSODs (with errors such as "Unknown
Hard Error" and "Kernel_Data_ Inpage_Error" and references to atapi.sys) and
the system locks up at random intervals after increasingly short periods
having booted up.
The problems first occurred under Windows however, when I tried booting
Linux it just locked up. The HDD light stays on and it sounds like it's
doing something, but it doesn't get anywhere and requires a cold restart.

My questions are:
1. What tools can I use to determine if it is a faulty HDD?

2. If I were to purchase a new HDD (most likely bigger than my current one),
and assuming I can still read the old disk, could I copy everything
currently on the old disk onto the new one in such a way that I could just
swap the new one in and boot straight away without losing data or partition
info? (Could I dd the old disk to the new disk and then use a tool to
resize the partitions to fill the empty space on the new disk?).

I'm quite out of my depth here but I'm willing to give just about anything
a go. I would like to image the old drive onto the new one as I only have
the system restore disk for windows so reinstalling is not possible.
Unfortunately, I still haven't been able to set up the VPN connections to my
university under Linux so it is not yet possible for me to drop Windows
completely (although rest assured, I am seriously considering going "Free"
with my next PC purchase).

Best Regards,
-Alasdair-

.P.S.: Sorry for the length and amount of rambling, it's late and as you
can tell I'm a little stressed