Hi everyone, I hope you can help me avoid a nervous break down as my HD with all my school and work info on it may be dying. I am hoping its windows messing up as usuall. Out of nowhere ive begun to have problems accessing large files on my secondary drive (Seagate ST325082 3AS SCSI). My main drive, the one with windowx xp on it is a segate ST380011A. I dont know to much about hardware but apprently my secandary drive is SATA and my primary one with the OS is not.

Recently every time i try to access large files off my secondary drive, particularly video files, I get an incredible lagging after a while. If its a movie, 10 minutes into ill experience severe lag. This lag ultimatly brings the system to a halt and I need to restart by yanking the plug. I almost seems as if the cache or something starts to choke on too much data. This never happend before/started couple days ago. Does anyone have any idea what could be causing this? Do you feel it is a HARDWARE problem? If so how could i go about backing up this data? I tried to copy a file over from one drive to the other and also experienced lag and eventual system inoperability. Any help would be greatly and i mean grealy appriciated. I have so much going on right now, including a cross country move soon, I really did not need this to add to my troubles.

Again, i appriciate any help you can render, even if its a friendly hug (prefer from a female hehe) )

OTHER SYS SPECS:
Asus a78nx delux nforce2 board

UPDATE, I scanned drive with HDDScan_v28.zip and got a SMART SELF TEST "error with read element failed" message. Does this mean my drive is dead? The wierd thing is that i am stable to access files and run/play them for a while before the lag/instability problem happens. ALso there is one folder that when i try to access I get a mesage stating that the file/folder is currpt.

Hi,

Your problem might be caused by a dying head getting unstable as the temperature rises.
What U can do:
1. imediately stop using it, I mean don't power it up and let it go under an OS.
2. I would try to create an image of the drive while giving it some active cooling. This one is also tricky if U have a drive in such condition, I cannot give U good advice here, since U may need some tools to do it.

regards,
pepe
[hug]

Ah crap... It wont copy files over to my other HD, it gets stuck in the process and then windows bcomes laggy/unstable. Any ideas? Is this sort of thing repairable? would it cost millions and the use of spys? lol sigh Im from portugal too, originally, help out a fellow port in need By the way there is a FAN right next to the HD blowing air at it.

Are you sure? It says zero messages \