«

[Caged]

Beofre you go declarin gyour HDD a loss, use the command line to do a chkdsk in winxp

It will tell you if you have any bad sectors present on your disk. (the same goes for win98.
If bad sectors are there, then go the new HDD route. however, if it is not a bad disk, i would say that you are having issues with your windows installer and should try a repair of your windows version before going through the trouble fo a reformat.

[Data]

check your memory for faults again.
a large file might be at a different place in your memory then a small one and hence trigger something

[efthimios]

It could be one of 4 things from experience with this type of fault.

1)HDD is close to dying.
2)A cable or two is getting loose.
3)Kiss your mainboard goodbye
4)Ram, bad ram.

First of all copy all your important files.

Then check your system with a good all around utility like Everest or Sandra or something.

[_r.u.s.s.]

have you tried to copy to/from that disk mounted in another computer(friend's for exsample)

if files will coppy WITH problems then
its in your HDD!
else
its in your OS/motherboard/ram k:

[Caged]

you could try using this program I found that will test your memory while it is running. It is recommended to start this b4 going to bed and check it in the morning

memTest.exe

http://www.kfs.org/memtest/