[lithium112]

Hi,
My computer started crashing recently in various, seemingly unrelated conditions. To preface, my setup is:

HP Pavillion dv5250 notebook
Windows XP Professional SP2
120GB, 5400RPM Harddrive (SATA, I believe)

Symptoms of the crash are the following:

System becomes slow (at first) and then unresponsive. The light that symbolizes a harddisk access operation keeps lighting up for a few seconds (2-3 sec each time) and then going off for about 1 second before lighting up again. It continues with this pattern until I reboot the computer by holding the power button. After I restart it and check the Event Viewer, I see multiple entries of a warning under the System heading, several seconds apart, leading up to the time of the reboot. The events always list "disk" as the Source and contain the following:

Event ID: 51
Description: "An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk0\D during a paging operation."
(As every event logged, it also provides the raw data dump (in bytes and words). Please let me know if this is important and I will post it. Though, from what little I could find regarding Event 51 warnings, the data is fairly typical and doesn't provide too much information beyond the description).

The crash is encountered in various conditions:

I first encountered the problem when connecting a new mp3 player I'd purchased through a USB port. I find it odd that the system starts paging the hard drive repeatedly, when I am connecting an external memory device...
Then the problem occurred in other circumstances:
- when trying to view the properties of the hard disk through the Device Manager
- at the end of a game installation
- when trying to access the properties of a wireless network card through Device Manager

To me, the above conditions seem entirely unrelated. The only possible explanation I can come up with is that there is a problem in communication between the hard drive and external devices through the motherboard or something. I really don't know.

If anyone has any insight to offer regarding this problem I would be very grateful, as this has been bugging me for a while now.

Also, if there is any other information I can post to shed light on the issue, please let me know.

[lithium112]

Just as an update, in case people experience a similar problem. The problem is caused by corrupted sectors on the drive. I ran

chkdsk /R

in the command prompt and the problem was resolved.

[FishBowl]

You should check your disk frequently for quite some time, to find out, if the bad sector issue comes back. If so, go for a new disk.
Attach that by a suitable USB2 HDD controller first, create partitions and format them.
Copy all the content of non-system partitions.
Then get an imaging tool, to copy the system partition.
At last, put inside.
If not possible / working, use another computer, to copy everything. Even then, better use USB2 interfaces, to enable hotplugging and avoid drive letter issues or possible damage for the host system.
Image tools don't care for any kind of file protection or user rights on the source or target.

You will have to reactivate XP after this.

But also possible, the error won't return (for a long time).
Activate S.M.A.R.T. control in your BIOS setup, to enable an early warning.

Bad sectors may come from physical degrading or shock damage of the disk in most cases, but they sometimes also result from really bad crashes or even connector / cable discontinuities.