device hard disk has a bad block

Hi, I have a Windows XP desktop. Am using this since past 1 year and never had any problem. But since 10 days suddenly my boot time increased, desktop started freezing, applications respond very slow, even task manager freezes while launching. That’s not all. When I try to print anything from this system, the print job freezes for about 2 minutes and then suddenly I see a message saying ‘deleting’ instead of ‘Spooling’. I don’t know what happened to it.

First I thought it could be due to virus hence I ran deep scan with Norton antivirus installed on my system. I also tried scanning with few online scanners but none of them found anything suspicious. I also tried updating entire system drivers but the same result yet.

While troubleshooting today morning I reached to Event Viewer and found the following error message listed: "The device harddisk has a bad block". I have no idea what does it means? Can anyone of you please provide some help? Many Thanks.

Thats true buddy. Your hard drive is almost dead. The best i can suggest you is buy a new hard drive as soon as possible and backup your data because it is dead completely you may loos your data as well.

By saying almost dead i mean, it can work for few more weeks but you will need to waste your time in the same like you are doing now waiting to get the system normal after freeze. Better buy a 160GB hard drive, its is available now a days at very price.

Yep, that may be correct. It can be Hard drive fault. If you doubt you can confirm the same by going to Start > RUN > type CMD > Enter.

In command prompt type CHKDSK C: /R and press Agree to restart,type:EXIT Restart pc. This will scan the entire hard drive for bad sectors and other problems. It possible it will repair those bad sectors (bad block) automaticlaly if they are repairable.