Resolved Lots of problems, mostly my computer won't start + BSOD

Hello, I've been having a lot of problems lately and I'm hoping someone can tell me the root cause.

Symptoms:

My computer is booting up very slow and sometimes not at all because the loading screen goes on forever. Other times, I am greeted with a BSOD while it's trying to load. The BSOD messages have included: "UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME" and "SESSION3_INITIALIZATION_FAILED" I have also had the black screen "disk read error occurred, press ctrl+alt+del" message. One time I got "Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: WINDOWS\SYSTEM\CONFIG\SYSTEM "

My event viewer is giving me a lot of errors and warnings, mainly event IDs 11 and 51. They all have a disk source and say "a controller error" has been detected. Everything I've checked online says it could be the HDD enclosure or cable. It's true that pressing on my hard drive connections seems to my computer start up OK. But I ran chkdsk and there were bad clusters where some of my system filed were located. (Granted, I've never really ran chkdsk so I don't know how long bad clusters have been present.)

Sometimes I can run my computer OK for a whole day or two or three, but it will randomly freeze and then have trouble booting up. I'm using it right now and worried when it will freeze! One other random occurrence two days ago: All my Firefox settings randomly were erased and went to default; it was as if I had just installed Firefox.

My question:

What is the likely cause? I just want to buy a new hard drive if that's going to fix these problems so I can stop worrying. But I guess if it could just be the HDD cable, I could just switch that and save my time moving all my data. But even though I am no expert, all this evidence sounds to me like my HDD must be dying altogether. It is several years old.

Thank you!

 

It likely is the hard drive but I'd change the cable and see if that helps. They're only a couple bucks.

Then if no joy, go ahead and get the new hard drive.

Time is of the essence since your personal data will be lost when the drive finally goes south. Act now to back it up to some other media.