Sudden Windows XP problems out of the blue

Hi there. Ok, I have a computer with the following;

Athlon 2.2ghz processor
512mb ddr ram
windows xp sp2

My primary master, secondary master and primary slave are all hard drives. My secondary slave is a DVD writer.

From time to time one of my hard drives (I believe it was my secondary hard drive) would stop responding when I tried to open it, causing windows to stop responding.

If I switched the computer off and made sure all the ribbons and power cables were connected to the drives properly it would come back on again.

Now my computer was working fine apart from doing this every now and then, it would boot in about 25 seconds and all the programs in windows were working fine. I do not recall installing anything or running anything without scanning it over the last few days.

There are a few problems as of last night. To start with my Photoshop started acting up. Any time I tried to load Photoshop or open a .psd file it would give the "do you want microsoft to send an error report?" message. This kept happening even after restarting a few times.

Then, whenever I tried to start it up from last night, it takes about a minute and a half to get to the windows login screen (it was still taking 25 seconds yesterday morning!)

Once it boots into windows it gives an error message which i was way too stressed out to write down yesterday. It was to do with a file in the system32 folder being invalid or not working properly, and said to check it against my windows disc or something. It then takes about a minute or so before it will really respond.. the mouse will move etc but clicks won't really register for about a minute.

I ran Spybot and AdAware, they found a few things (spybot found about 6 tracking cookies, ad aware found 15 minor problems) and removed them.

I tried updating AVG before running it, but although I was connected to the net it said AVG couldn't connect to update itself. I tried running avg normally and it gave a similar error to photoshop.

I tried downloading some antivirus that ended up needing an activation key, so I got something called something along the lines of ViriIT and it scanned the pc and didn't turn anything up.

At this point I was having to use firefox, if i tried to use internet explorer it would crash after a couple of seconds, error report message again.

I've tried running chkdsk with /f and it says it will run on startup, but then it doesn't actually run on the next startup :/

Please help.. I am really worried.. I don't even know if it's a virus that hasn't been detected or if the main hard drive is failing.. or if my windows install has become corrupt or something :/

 

I'm also just using the windows firewall of late, and I tried to use the windows update yesterday, it got the updates, asked if it could install them and when I clicked yes it just seemed to sit and do nothing ...

and if i tried going to add/remove programs.. this didn't work either

 

Cheers for that Pete, I've also realised I've not tried a system restore.. might be worth a try!

Unfortunately I'm at work just now so I'll have to wait till tonight to try it out.. thanks for your help though. If anyone else still wants to chime in with other suggestions it would be much appreciated!

 

I had the same problem. I replaced the cables for the drives and never had a problem since. Ribbon cables do go bad.
Irv

 

Cheers, I'll probably do that...

Regarding my computer, sfc /scannow just hung, chkdsk came up with nothing, and it wouldn't let me use system restore, it just wouldn't respond.. I managed to update AVG but still it found nothing, neither did spybot or adaware, so I eventually just gave in and formatted.

I managed to back up all my stuff onto another drive first, but unfortunately I forgot to copy some reason files so I lost about 10 pieces of my original music.. which is a bummer...

Everything's working now at least, cheers for the suggestions anyways!