chkdsk hangs during boot up

Something went wrong with my Windows XP system. It was working fine until day before yesterday when I turned it off at night. Yesterday morning when I booted it up again, CHKDSK appeared recommending me to run the complete disk check. I said ok and let it run but it gets freezed on about 25% . Pressing any key wont work here and the only way to get out of this is by hard reboot. But again on the boot check disk appears and if I let it go, it stucks on the same 25%. It went all the day and finally I left it for the whole night. Today morning when I saw, it was still on 25%.

I rebooted it again and skipped CHKDSK this time. It logged in to XP successfully but system was very very slow like I am using 128MB of RAM. Even Browser takes about 2 minutes to open. Any idea what is wrong? Is my Hard drive dead? Any workout for the same?

Yep, 90% it seems to be a faulty Hard Drive. You should visit the hdd manufacturer's website and download Hard Drive diagnostic utility. Run the same. It will scan and repair the errors. If there is any huge problem you may need to change the drive. For safer side, take entire back of the drive before it gets dead.

Apart from Diagnostic tool, CHKDSK is compulsory to run. If it is not able to complete in normal mode as you stated above then you should try running chkdsk using different method. The best way to run the same is from Recovery console. Insert your XP Installation CD and press R to enter repair console.

here select disk prompt and type the following command:
chkdsk /r

once it is completed, run the following commands as well:
fixboot
fixmbr

After this, remove the CD and boot the PC in normal mode. See what happens.

Thank you very much for the help buddy, i will surely try this troubleshooting later tonight when i reach home and let you know the results. By the way, do i need to backup my drive before i carry out all these commands? Is there any risk of loosing my data during this?

You are welcome. Nope, there is no risk of loosing data during this process. But as the Check Disk is prompting every time, it is sure that your hard drive has some problem and it will be good decision to back up before it dies completely.

First, as "philo" recommended, check out your HDD with the HDD diagnostic utility that you can download from the disk's manufacturer. You've got to determine that you're dealing with a non-defective HDD. If the disk proves defective you'll have no choice but to replace it. Then you can install it in your system (I'll assume you're working with a desktop machine) as a secondary HDD (after installing a new HDD & fresh-installing the XP OS onto that drive) and try to copy off as much data as you can assuming you'll be able to access that drive.

If your present HDD checks out OK... Forget about the Recovery Console business.

Probably the wisest course at this point would be to undertake a Repair install of the XP operating system for which you will need the XP OS installation CD. We're assuming that your XP installation CD is a "full" CD, not an OEM-branded recovery disk, and as such you'll be able to run a Repair install from that XP installation CD. Unfortunately many users who have a OEM-branded PC do not have this "full" XP installation CD and therefore cannot run the Repair install that I'm going to generally describe.

The process of undertaking a Repair install of the OS is relatively straightforward. It would be roughly akin to making a fresh install of the OS, but in nearly every case your existing programs & user-created data would be retained. While it would be a rather rare situation where data would be lost or corrupted as a result of the Repair install (even if such was nsuccessful), and as unlikely as it may be, it *could* happen. I mention this because if there is any data on the HDD that is absolutely crucial to you and which you could not tolerate its loss, then you should *not* undertake the Repair install at this point, but rather first attempt to access the data through other means, for example, by installing the disk in another machine as a secondary drive and copy the data you need.

There are a number of websites that contain step-by-step instructions for undertaking a Repair install. As I previously indicated the process is not at all difficult and not terribly time-consuming. If you do a Google search on "XP repair install", you'll be pointed to many of these sites. Here are a few...

http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;315341

Assuming the Repair install is successful, you should use your anti-virus and/or any other anti-malware program that you use to immediately check out your PC for any virus infestation. Also, you will need to download/install *all* the MS critical updates since SP3. (I'm assuming that if you do undertake the Repair install, you will be doing so with a "slipstreamed" XP CD that contains SP3. But if that's not available use whatever XP OS installation CD is at your disposal).

Needless to say, there's no guarantee that the Repair install will be successful since there may be problems present - hardware or software - other than a mildly-corrupted OS that a Repair install will generally correct. But it seems to me that based upon your description of the problem it's certainly worth a try at this point.

Again, should the Repair install prove successful use your A-V program to immediately check out your PC for any virus infestation. And, of course, install any MS critical updates to bring your system up-to-date security-wise.