After Windows XP has finished booting a message appears on the screen saying that the computer has recovered from a serious error and an error report has been created. This report contains technical jargon which means nothing to me. If I choose not to view the error report the message goes away, but then returns a few seconds later. If I view the error report, it says that the error has been caused by a hard drive error. Following the instructions, I ran Chkdsk on the hard drive. However, Chkdsk stops during operation and does not indicate why Chkdsk stopped running. Restarting the computer results in the same serious error message appearing. Another problem which may be related is that in the last few weeks the computer speed has significantly slowed down. For example, it now takes minutes (rather than seconds) to open email. Scanning the computer with Norton Antivirus and Spybot Search & Destroy did not indicate any problems.

From the description of the problem it seems that there is a hardware problem with your computer. The error messages which are being produced indicate the problem may be related to your hard drive and the symptoms (such as a computer slow down) also provide a degree of confirmation that this could be the problem. Being someone who regularly sees hard drives in computers fail, before going any further I strongly suggest that you backup all the data you wish to keep to another source in case the hard drive decides to completely fail in the not so distant future. Your best option would be to purchase an external hard drive and then copy any data you wish to keep across to the external drive. This means if the hard drive does completely fail you have a backup of your important data.

Once you have a backup of your data, we need to conduct some further checks on the hard drive. Most hard drive manufacturers provide utilities on their website to test the hard drive for faults. As a starting point, you first need to determine the brand and model of hard drive in your computer. You should be able to do this through the Windows Device Manager. Go to the “Start” menu > “Control Panel” and open the “System” control panel (you may need to first open the “Performance and Maintenance” category). In the window that appears, click the “Hardware” tab and the “Device Manager” button. Expand the “Disk drives” category and you should see your drives listed within. Once you have determined the brand and model of drive, you need to visit the website of the hard drive manufacturer. Once at their website, look in their support section for downloads relevant to your hard drive. There should be a diagnostic utility available allowing you to test the hard drive for faults. For example, Western Digital provide the “Data Lifeguard Tools” package and Seagate provide “SeaTools” package. Download the utility relevant for your drive and follow the directions for testing your drive. Be aware, the software from each manufacturer is specific for the drives from that manufacturer, you cannot use the utility on any other brand of drive (e.g. you cannot use the Western Digital utility on a Seagate drive). So, make sure that you find the utility for your brand of drive. If the drive is found to be faulty, you will need to take your computer into a shop to have the hard drive replaced and (if the hard drive has not completely failed) transfer your data from the old drive onto the new drive.

The next possible cause of the problem could be faulty RAM (memory) in your computer. Sometimes faults which present themselves as a hard drive fault are actually faults with the computer memory. This is because as data is read from the hard drive into memory, the data is corrupted in memory, and then the computer attempts to operate based upon this corrupted data or attempts to write the corrupted data back to the hard drive. If the hard drive test does not indicate that the drive is faulty you should next try testing your computer memory. There is a very good utility called Memtest86+ (www.memtest.org) which conducts a thorough test of the computer memory, completely independent of the hard drive (as it runs from a bootable CD). This is available to download for free, and I strongly suggest you read all the instructions before commencing the tests as it can be a complex program for new users to grasp. If the computer memory is found to have a large amount of errors this may indicate faulty memory. Again, in this situation you will need to take the computer to a shop for further investigation and possible RAM replacement.