I had a strange problem with my Maxtor 5.2 GB hard drive last night.  I was
playing a game (Forsaken) and when I quit the game, I immediately got a blue
screen with disk read/write error, press any key to continue.  Pressed  any
key and the system is just hung up.  Drive light is on.  Press restart.  Go
through post and then get hard disk failure message, "Press del to enter
.... F1 to continue."  F1 eventually leads to insert a system disk message.
At some point I get a message that there is no FAT table.  Boot from a
floppy and try to look at C, nothing there.  Try to Fdisk ... get message -
"no fixed disk present."  Restart and go into setup.  Go to IDE HDD auto
detect tab and manually select the HD.  Restart and the system boots all the
way to a "GDI.exe missing, reinstall windows message".  Restart,  boot to
safe mode.  Nothing is apparently wrong.  Restart again and all is well.

I ran a complete virus scan (no virus),  a thorough scan disk (no errors)
left the machine on all night.  This morning all is well.  Did I dream this?
The system is less than a year old.

Is my hard drive getting ready to fail?

Could heat have anything to do with this?  My temps are running at 48
degrees C, 118 degrees F.  No telling what the temp was after running the
game for 30 minutes.

System:

PII 266
BCM Research 630 motherboard 440 lx
128 MB
Maxtor 5.2 hard drive
Diamond G460 AGP video.
Assorted peripherals

Anyone have any advice.  What else can I look at? Is this a failure getting
ready to happen? Sorry this is so long.  Thanks.

Ben Moore
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