If your computer has been working right, then starts acting erratic, your hard drive may be failing.
WARNING! You can loose data (that was on the verge of being lost anyway) that is stored in a hard drive sector that is failing or has gone bad.
If possible, make a BACKUP IMAGE of your hard drive to another hard drive before running CheckDisk. To do this, you will need a program such as Acronis or Norton Ghost that makes a total image backup.
Windows has a DOS Utility called
chkdsk that checks every sector on your hard drive that you can use.
To run this:
- Click the Windows Start button
- Click the Run command
- Type in chkdsk and press the Enter key or click OK
- Windows will run this Utility and verify all sectors on your hard drive. If any sectors are bad, they are fixed and reported to you.