hard drive possibly dieing

I believe my hard drive is possibly dieing...the computer had completely locked up (first time ever locking up with xp for me) during defragmentation. Fine, restart, see what happens. XP's diskchecker starts, and it freezes at 57% for files and folders. Great, restart and try safe-mode...that freezes as well, but before it can even start up completely. The only way it starts up is by skipping the normal startup's diskchecker (which I highly believe is running into the corruption and thus causing the hangs). During these hangs, CPU spikes and then settles down every second or two.

Is there anyway to isolate the damaged part (which I believe is there) from the rest of the hard drive, to prevent further damage to the disk?

This computer is 6-years old, a refurbished one bought from gateway, so it doesn't surprise me this is happening.

 

Run chkdsk /r from the recovery console.

 

At the end, all it really said was that it found some errors and fixed them, but it did not give any detail. Is there a logfile of this saved somewhere, and if so, where?

 

There's no edit feature is there...

Anyways, I just found this:

C:\FOUND.000

In it, it has 22 files in it, starting from "FILE0000.chk" and going until "FILE0021.chk", all are 24 kb, and the description is "Recovered File Fragments". When opening the files, all I get is a binary dump. Is this a definite sign that my hard drive is going down the crapper?

 

Those are files created by chkdsk, it contains bits and pieces of files that were found on the drive and then repaired. The file is a binary file.