Help! Massive hd loss! Can't defrag! Paging file problem?

Howdy y'all.
I'm getting desperate here.
My computer, of late, has been giving me this error at start-up: "Your system has no paging file, or the paging file is too small", something about low virtual memory.
Well, I did, I think, everything I was instructed to do so by the Microsoft support site. (under ref. # 315270)

I noticed my free space getting smaller for no reason... I'd shut down and start up, BAM! 250 MB gone! Just vanished. Today, half a gig! Before, about a gig! I've deleted files, I've cleared space, I've ran programs to clean things up, nothing... it happens I think every start-up.

When I try to defragment my drive, it tells me that there's a scheduled chkdsk to do... I tried doing that under "run"... it does nothing. When I try to defrag, same message.

so:

How can I stop losing my hd space? I only have about 200MB left!
How can I fix this paging file problem?
How can I defrag?

Thanks for any help folks, this is serious for me here!

 

Run the drive fitness test from your hard drive manufacturer to determine if the drive is going bad.

 

I'm still losing space to some black hole at every start-up.

I shall try that... PowerMax I believed the program is called... after I get back from work.
I again tried restting my paging/virtual memory values (deleted almost 3 gigs of stuff, reboot, reset values, reboot... still no dice... went from what should have been 3.8+ free to 2.2 gigs free now). I reset them to 384-800, and I got a little warning that my file "pagefile.sys" was corrupt or gone... something like that.

Any advice on that?

And what of my chkdsk problem, where I can't defrag, and it keeps telling me to run chkdsk (which I did, under "run").

 

lets find out if the hard drive fitness test comes back ok first. No sense in trying to diagnose something only to find out the hard drive may be bad.