Blue screen of death! Do I need a new HDD?

[Friction]

Hi guys!

I need some advice please - it's going to be vague, sorry - but I'm having trouble with my PC and it's doing my head in! My current machine is a new build, about 6 months old, the only thing carried over and is a good couple of years old is my HDD.

Basically it's happened a few times intermittantly, but I get the lovely BSOD (using XP) then it will go away and come back some months later. Thing is every time I get a spell of it, windows will boot, want to run check disc and proceed to tell me stuff like its:

Deleting corrupt files
Restoring/repairing corrupted files.

Windows sometimes pops up that it's had an error writing to a certain file and what not too.

Today Chkdsk on boot is telling me stuff like:

Deleting corruted attribute record
Deleting Orphan file record segment

also goes on about something to do with restoring index sectors and again orphan file entry or something.

So has anyone got ANY idea what this means? I think it would appear the HDD is not playing ball, and it might be time to replace? Today too my machine just decided to remove all trace of MSN, and I had a real hard time installing it - having to go off an find missing DLL files and all sorts.

Any and all advice, pointers, help etc would be very very welcome

(sorry for the vague mess - you can tell I'm not very technically minded when it comes to PCs!)

CHEERS!

[briareos_kerensky]

Check on the HDD manufacturer website for the diagnostic tools and run the non-disruptive tests first. Also, you might want to turn on SMART from the BIOS; sometimes SMART reporting is a bit too sensitive but in this situation will surely help in determining what kind of problem the HDD has.

[Friction]

Thanks for the info there Briareos!

It's quite an old drive so not sure about the SMART stuff. However within less than an hour of posting, the machine has given up the ghost! Windows now boots to the XP screen, then the screen goes black and nothing! Safe mode doesn't work, nor does anything else.

I had a similiar problem some months back with my old machine that died - and of course I replaced everything BUT the HDD. Though I had some other technical issues then too, I just wished I'd spent a few quid more on the new build for a new HDD and then perhaps I wouldn't be having this issue!