Hard drive acted strange

Hi, I'm new here and I'm not sure whether this is the right forum to start this thread. Sorry, if not.

Today I turned my PC (WinXP) on in the morning and went to the kitchen, so I don't know what exactly happened when I was away. When I returned it was kind of on, but the monitor didn't show anything and acted as though it was off (orange light instead of a green one). The red light on the computer case (AFAIK it's the one that tells that the computer is accessing the hard drive) was on and wasn't blinking. I waited for a minute or so and nothing changed. I tried to reboot it with the little button on the computer case and nothing happened, so I turned it off with the big one. I turned it on again and it acted as usual, no black screens or anything.

I decided that I needed to clean my PC, since I didn't do it for over a year. So I unplugged it, found a lot of dust, cleaned with a little brush and some wind power produced by my lungs, since I was afraid to use the vacuum cleaner. I was also kind of afraid to use the brush, since it was too hard. I tried to be as accurate as possible. I cleaned it, turned it on, and it ran smoothly. I tried to browse the Internet - all went well. Then, I tried to access the hard drive. It went well. I opened one of the folders, all fine. I open the next one - my PC does one of those short beeps that give me a heart attack each time and froze. It didn't open the folder, btw. I couldn't even move the mouse pointer. Then, the mouse pointer unfroze, but everything other didn't. I couldn't do anything. A couple of seconds later, the screen went black, and then I nearly had a heart attack - it went blue with a lot of white letters.

I know what a BSoD is, and I am pretty sure that this wasn't one of them. There was really a lot of words. I tried to read it, but it disappeared in a couple of seconds. The only thing I read was smth like: "An error occurred and to prevent your PC from dying we turned it off. The error was caused by [here was a file name I don't exactly remember. It had three letters and started with "n". Something like n4v.exe, although I'm not sure it was an .exe. I tried searching for it later and failed to find it]. Then the screen went black again and the PC rebooted without my help. An hour later, it runs smoothly, accesses the same hard drive and folders without any problems. I haven't tried rebooting it or turning off, cause I'm afraid that it won't turn on again. The hard drive I tried to access when it all froze was not the one Windows is on.

Does anybody know what this could be? Could I have had damaged the hard drive or is it the continuation of the same problem that occurred in the morning? Sorry for the long post, I don't know much about computers and don't know what could prove to be important.

 

Welcome to MG, So I gather you have more than 1 Hard drivein stalled ... have you tried booting with the OS one on its own?? if it boots Ok and runs OK check the wiring connection (power) on the other drive and make sure it is well seated/connected, before powering up. Also is it an Eide or Sata Drive ?????

 

As I said, I'm not too good at computers. As far as I understand, I have one hard drive, it's just split into two, one with the OS and the other with all the other stuff. What could booting the one with the OS only show? Because both of the hard drives are working fine now. I'm confused about wtf was that and afraid that this could happen again. I don't know whether it is Eide or Sata.

 

I believe so.

I did exactly as you said. It ran chkdsk. Was it supposed to show some kind of report? Because it didn't. As far as I understood, it didn't find anything.

Btw, I checked disk C: like you said, but that's not the one that had problems, that's the one that has OS on.