Hard drive begining to fail?
 

I have 2 hard-drives installed on my older P4 (2.6GHz) rig. The 30g HD has the operating system installed on it (Win XP) and the 80g HD is used for storage. Lately, i'll lose the 80g drive in windows explorer. If i use winamp to play an mp3 on the 80g drive, it'll play at 1st, then it won't. Seems the drive acts like a ghost.....sometimes it's there, sometimes it's not. Is the problem with that drive or perhaps on the 30g initial drive? I'm thinking the drive with the OS is at fault. Any ideas?

btw, my taskbar changed this morning when i booted. It's got the gay winxp look to it as opposed to the "classic view". This leads me to believe something is wrong with the 30g drive.

go to control panel>administrative tools>event viewer.
anything with an error under system? warning referencing "disk"???

Yup, a shitload

Your fucked back up BrutalAnal_1.avi onto a dvd and buy a new HD

Yeah, back it up sooner than later (burn to DVD, USB drive, etc). If you got the time you'll get a better price from an online store for a new drive as opposed to a brick and mortar store. I'm guessing it's an IDE drive right? Something like this maybe:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822148104

You can also check your drive manufacturer page to see if they have any downloadable utilities to "diagnose" the drive (something like this: http://support.wdc.com/download/index.a ... d=3&swid=2) if you want to know for sure.

Meh, i wiped the drive clean and did a new install. Using it now, so far no problems. This rig is in desperate need up an update but i'm spending money elsewhere.

The task bar thing makes me thing virus, or malware. Hense why a format would help.

Yeah, i suspected the same thing. No matter how careful you are, seems you always get infected.