Using Soyo SY-5EMA+ V1.0
AMD K6-2 450
128 meg PC-100
Samsung 4.3

Lately, when opening programs, my computer takes up to a minute or two at
times (not always) to open an additional program. The hard drive light
lights up and the mouse freezes until the program opens. Sometimes this
happens when I am trying to save a program and others when I am just opening
a new one. Twice I got the following message:


                Disk Write Error

    Unable to write to disk in drive C:
    data or files may be lost
    press any key to continue,

and had to just turn it off and lose what I was trying to save.

Once it was C:, the other time E:, both of which are on the same hard drive.
Does this necessarily mean the hard drive is going south, or could something
else be causing the error? I am keeping everything backed up, and am
planning on keeping it til it dies, if that is what it is doing.
Once while starting the computer, it stopped at the windows screen and
didn't finish booting, but the drive light didn't stay on. Started it in
safe mode, then shut down and restarted normally. Couple of times when the
power went off and back on, took a couple of hours fiddling with it to get
it to boot.
thanks
ed

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