I was working on a computer running Windows XP that took up to 20 minutes to load personal settings. This is a fairly new Dell with a Pentium 4. I tried to fix the problem by taking unnecessary stuff out of the start-up and then I defragmented the hard drive. I restarted it and it was a little faster. I decided to run the check disk utility. It went throught the check disk and a message came up that said it had completed the check disk. It froze up on that blue screen. It was after hours so I left it like that overnight and when I came back it was still not working. Someone had tried to start it up in safe mode and it just gave them a bunch of messages and froze again. (I didn't see these messages) They said that nothing worked and they tried to do a Windows XP repair. After that, it would give them an error message about the hard drive. (Again I didn't see the message). Does anyone know what might be going on? Does this sound like a hardware problem? Should I continue to use that hard drive? Thanks for the help.
To test your drive, go to drive maker site and get their utility. It runs off of floppy. Run the tests and if necessary, you can always restore to factory condition.
<EDIT> If they don't have one, here's Maxtor's Powermax.
Linear Mode
