MSconfig WILL NOT START--So P'd off right now

Here's the story, it may not be necessary and incredibly long but read anyways.

A few hours ago McAfee popped up with an error claiming that SpamKiller was corrupted and needed to be reinstalled. So I go to Add and Remove Programs, McAfee SecurityCenter, and tell it to remove SpamKiller and ONLY SpamKiller. After I restarted, all of McAfee was GONE.

So here I'm thinking, "Well that was weird. I guess I'll just install again." I do so and it runs fine...until it popped out a warning claiming that some file was corrupt and I needed to run CHKDSK. So I did that...

Freakin' CHKDSK ran for THREE HOURS and "fixed" what seemed like THOUSANDS of "BAD SECTORS" or whatever...Then after it finished my computer restarted and it ran AGAIN!!! This time it told me "Volume is clean" after finishing.

Here's where the **** really went down. McAfee did not run at startup like it was supposed too. I go to the start menu and try to open McAfee and I'm swamped with several errors exclaiming, "BAD WINDOWS IMAGE."

I uninstall and install McAfee yet again...no errors this time...everything runs smoothly.

There are a few abnormalities that I'm beginning to find, though. Such as NoScript, a plugin for FireFox, isn't appearing on FireFox *FIXED BY REINSTALLING NO SCRIPT!!!* and MSCONFIG will not open.

When I attempt to open MSCONFIG, it vomits an error. *See the attached image.*

Exactly how am I supposed to reinstall MSCONFIG!? You can't....can you?

What happened to my computer?

 

It sounds like your HardDrive is going.

If Chkdsk found lots of bad sectors you have a real problem.

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I would start backing up any important files immediately. I'm serious.

If you want to try to salvage your HD you could get the utility disk from the manufacturer's website either Western Digital or Maxtor/Seagate and have it run the long diagnostic to see if it can fix any errors more completely than Windows. But the drive will always be questionable in regards to reliability.

A quick check would be get belarc advisor and see what it reads the S.M.A.R.T. ( a hard disk monitoring program that most HD have running) status as being. A drive that is going doesn't always show as bad; but a drive that shows as bad is pretty much gone.

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You could try getting CCleaner and on the Tools section click startup to see if it can access the MSconfig startup list.

 

Ok, if I understand correctly, the corrupted files and "bad sectors" are being caused by a failing hard drive? Right?

 

That's my opinion. Usually if chkdsk finds a couple of bad sectors it is no big deal, but a lot of bad sectors is bad news. Because all you did was install and uninstall McAfee and you had problems in FF and Msconfig along with Mcafee it seems to be a problem with your disk rather than a single program.

I can't guarantee that the drive is going bad but if it was mine, I'd back up my important data get a new HD to put my Operating System on and then worry about salvaging the current HD. From my experience bad sectors seem to multiply and HDs go from quirky to unusable with little to no notice.

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Go through My Documents or where ever you may have important files and write them to CD/DVD then reboot and run chkdsk again with both options checked and see if it finds any new errors. Or get the manufacturer's diagnostic and see what it says.