Hard drive errors

[njven]

Well, I've been having some hard drive problems for a while now. Originally, some Windows files became corrupt, and every time the WGA update tried to install, the system would crash. Don't remember what I did, but eventually it was all working fine. Today I try to extract a large RAR and it's crashed on 3 attempts now. CHKDSK doesn't find anything. When I had the problem before, CHKDSK said it fixed to problem and it just kept coming back. How can I fix these annoying errors without losing any data? I don't have the money to nor time to buy an external hard drive to backup all my data to. I've backed up the most important stuff to a 30GB HD in an old machine. The hard drive can't be going bad already right? It's only 270 days old, not even a year now. Everything seems to work fine except for that picky little RAR. Any good disk diagnostic tools or other suggestions you guys can recommend?

 

[MrLinux]

Most drive manufacturers will have a drive test utility somewhere on their web site, alternatively get a copy of Ultimate Boot CD.