After even further investigation of my hard disk problems I have found that the hard disk is not only software corrupted, it’s also hardware corrupt, the disk has physical sectors corrupted. I’m not sure whether it was Windows XP SP3 that corrupted it but it was working fine before I applied the service pack and now it suddenly has a hardware fault. I am looking for a way to fix the problem by marking the part of the disk as bad so the filesystem no longer tries to read and write from it. Microsoft’s Chkdisk is about as much use as a handbrake on a canoe, and the official Hitachi drive diagnostics application tries to fix the fault but returns a hardware fault message in the end. I know the error is between 6 to 7% so I am likely to lose around about 7.5GB of space. I could return it to PC World as it is still under guarantee as I’ve only had it five weeks but that would probably mean that it’ll be away for next week’s Alternation. Which is no use to me and I doubt that PC World will compensate me for loss of earnings. So I am looking for a workaround; scanning the internet for a solution. I have four days realistically to fix it as I it takes a day to load all the music onto the system. Of course I could always buy an external hard disk, I saw a 500GB monster for £70 in Maplin earlier. I have to wonder what I have to do to catch an even break in this world? I have a fiancee that is on the other side of the world, I seem to have extremely bad luck with electronics and work has been unreliable although I will earn £430 in the final 10 days of this month, just as well as it looks like I am going to need it!