My Maxtor 200 gig drive, after having it for only less than 2 years, has seemed to show symptoms of crashing... A few days ago, after booting up, I got a missing system32 file error message, so I restarted, and it booted into Windows, but it took a while. After that, I backed up a few important folders, which seemed to take forever (my computer was running quite slow, which is never does), and then restarted into a checkdisk... Normally, that wouldn't take too long, but it has been running for over a day, and is still working, after finding many, many bad sectors, and having a bunch of errors too. Does this sound like my hard drive crashed, or could it be a file system thing?
--Matt

If the drive is finding bad sectors then I would say the drive is going bad. Contact Maxtor to get the drive replaced.

Maxtor yep it's bad.

You can run SMART tests on your hard drives with the Bios or with Speedfan occasionally to see the health of your hard drive. It may save you one time in advance.

How would I go about doing this?

If you are really getting 'bad sectors' errors then the surface of the drive is physically damaged and you should definitely replace it. You may be under warranty still. Check with Maxtor right away. Seagate bough them out but I believe you can still go to Maxtor.com.

Chkdsk may get it up and running again, or maybe not, but if it does this will likely just happen again, this sounds like a LOT of damage for it to be taking that long. So if it does run again get your stuff off it pronto and then contact Maxtor immediately.

If the data is important to you, you need a data recovery service. You could have bad hard drive heads .

Something to bear in mind is that all modern hard drives have a reserved area of space to silently cover up bad sectors. If a bad sector occurs in the main part of the disk the drive electronics silently remaps this to a sector in the reserve space. Only when the reserve space is used up will you be able to actually detect bad sectors using surface scan software (except maybe by looking at the bad sector count in the SMART data but I don't know too much about that).

So to see any bad sectors at all is bad news although possible normal in a really old disk. To see many bad sectors, however, is disastrous and like notherdude says points towards physical damage of the disk.

Basically you need to replace it ASAP and make sure you've got all your data copied.