In need of serious help...

i dont quite know the problem... could be a virus. I would back up all your important files now and maybe try to reformat.

what I would do first if you can is get the new dell drivers for your i6000. they have 4 new ones on ther site. I would get rid of mcafee.

My gut feeling is either you've got a virus or your hard drive has gone whacko. In either case, your hard drive access is screwed. Have you been able to drop to a command prompt and run chkdsk /f ?

If it comes back and doesn't find any hard errors, back up what you can and reformat. If it does come back with hard errors, back up what you can and replace the hard disk. Unless money is REALLY tight, it really isn't worth keeping a dying hard drive around as it'll only cause you more grief later on. Especially the case if your warranty is still current.

Might want to try taking out the hard drive and reading it from a different computer or as a secondary drive. This will tell you if it's the hardware (hard drive) problem.

I would *really* check the hard disk first, at the very least using chkdsk /f ... if this problem is hardware related, reinstalling will NOT fix the problem and you'll need to replace the hard drive (and given the symptoms, I recon the odds of it being hardware versus virus are maybe 2:1).

Still, if you want to go the reinstall route, the Windows XP install process should give you the option of repartitioning, I think just deleting and recreating the partition in the XP install process should do the trick. It should also do a disk check of sorts but I'm not sure if it does a surface scan. If you want to use FDisk you'd want to be careful not to touch the Dell diagnostics partition.

No. Fdisk only creates/deletes partitions. More over, simply formatting doesn't completely erase all data. Use something like dban for a more thorough whipe

Sounds like something really strange then ... there's a flag set in the partition table that should tell Windows to check the disk in the startup phase. It's beginning to sound a little virusy (in that if it were a hardware error causing that sorta problem your computer shouldn't boot at all). Can you boot off your XP CD and do chkdsk from the recovery console?

sounds to me like that's a temporary file that got left over from an install ... I wouldn't worry about that file as such. I'd be more worried about what's causing it to become corrupt though ... I wouldn't delete it just yet, if only so that part of the disk won't be used for anything else. Perhaps renaming it to something (like .dat or something) will stop McAfee from scanning it (I'm not sure of McAfee by default scans all files or just files with executable code, of which .dll is one).

I'm surprised chkdsk went through that quickly ... try chkdsk /r (which should scan for bad sectors) ... again you'll almost certainly need to reboot.

If it were my computer and was using it for anything other than straight gaming and entertainment (ie. losing all the data on it would mean more to me than a spoiled night in), I'd replace the hard drive completely. Hard drives "naturally" come with bad clusters, in fact a brand new hard drive from the factory that scans clean actually has bad clusters, the hard drive reallocates them transparently ... you actually see bad clusters being reported when a cluster that WAS good becomes bad. This is a bad thing as it means something is deteriorating and on a laptop as new as yours that's cause for concern.

As for privacy, I'd just delete the files (which only deletes the index to the file, not the file data itself) then run a disk wiper which will wipe the file area (I use PGP tools but there are a pile on the net) to wipe disk free space. These all do some variant of the "standard" wipe (which should prevent anyone from recovering data, even if they have special equipment). Consists of at least 7 and up to 24 (and sometimes more) runs of:

* Write zeros
* Write ones
* Write random pattern
* Write complement of random pattern
* Write ones
* Write zeros

Apparently it's enough to protect your names, addresses and phone numbers from even the computer forensic agencies of major governments (but of course if you wanted to do it properly you'd need to make sure your swapfile was also wiped, etc) ... not that I'd imagine any of us would have anything to hide that badly . The only catch is, if more bad sectors form between when you do a disk scan and when you run this, it may get hung up on the bad sector.

Good luck!

You could give http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm
a try to recover data and/or fix trouble spots on the drive. I have never used this utility but it appears to be quite a technical marvel. And if it does not work you can get your money back.