Repair Disk without CD (Snow Leopard)?

Hi everyone!
My good ol' macbook has been running a bit slow lately so I went to Disk Utility and selected to verify the disk.  I was then informed that it was corrupt and I need to repair the disk, but I need my OSX installation to do it since I've been traveling and no longer have access.
So, I have several questions:
1.  Is there a way to repair the disk without the CD or do I just need to go buy another one?
2.  How do I actually go about repairing the disk when I get the CD (if I absolutely need one)?
3.  Do I need to be sure that I have everything backed up on my external harddrive before I do this?  I have time machine going frequently already, but I just want to be sure if the time machine back up is enough or if I have to do a manual copy & paste backup.
Also, I'm running OSX 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard).  My macbook is a 2007 model (still kicking! Just when I think of getting another one she proves me wrong) and I don't think I can go up to Lion... or at least not Mountain Lion for sure.
Thanks!

1. Yes, there is. Restart the computer with the Shift key held down to quietly run a disk repair utility.
2. Restart from the CD and open the Disk Utility from the Utilities menu.
3. Create a bootable clone on a second external drive. The Time Machine backup won't itself help if the internal drive gets erased and there isn't a second bootable system available.
(90178)

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