Something very odd is happening with my computer. First off, my CPU usage is at 20% when I'm doing nothing, yet under the Processes tab, nothing seems to be using any CPU cycles. As well, after my computer has been on for a while, the hard drive will start seeking for what seems to be no reason, and then the HDD light will stay on. A minute or two after that, the system will freeze and I'll have to restart. Once after a restart, both devices on my primary IDE were not recognized, but were fine after I hit restart again. As well, it seems whenever the HDD is doing some hefty work, it will begin having problems and start to make a noise that sounds like a beep, but could just be a vibration of some sort. When this is happening, it sometimes will freeze the system, but other times recover and keep going. Norton says I have no viruses, and I have not installed anything new recently. Any thoughts? and thank you for reading this far.

try running a system check at pcpitstop.com they might be able to locate the problem and help you correct it, also you might want to run one of their virus checks as on my system they picked up a few viruses that norton had missed.

Regardless of what O/S you have get a win98 bootdisk go to CMOS and make sure the FDD is first boot. Insert the disk into the FDD and boot up on it. When it comes to rest on the A:\> prompt type in (format c: /nosave /autofix /surface) exactly like that and press enter. let it run its course and when it gets to a graphic display it might produce a box and you must select (skip/undo) and press enter again. Then sit back and watch the bad sectors appear.

I have to say that running a command that starts with "format" seems a bit scary. Is it basically just doing a surface scan?

wow! Joel, just as well you are on the ball. I,m extremely sorry and i hope you havent done it yet. the command is:- A:\>scandisk c: /nosave /autofix /surface and it will not damage anything. however if your hdd has bad sectors you may not be able to retreive all of your files anyway.