issue with MacBook Pro booting up

[Jayme0625]

i have a 13 month old 13" MacBook Pro classic. Yesterday, i went to boot up the machine and I had the grey screen with flashing question mark. After a bit of googling, I managed to get it to boot after running a disk repair, and everything worked out fine after that. Fast forward to this evening. I booted up my macbook and had the flashing question mark once again. This time however, disk utility could not find my hard drive. Joy. I have booked an appointment at the Genius Bar to get this looked at, however, I'm wondering if anyone has any other ideas i could try in the interim. I'm really hoping my hard drive isn't failing as I don't want to have to replace it.