Thank you - soon I will have a copy of my original drive. Strange I had the same problem as the other night again - very slow to find C: and a lot of noise, yet ran the WD diagnosis s/w and it came up clear.

It sounds like you might need your backed-up data quite soon.

As soon as you get alot of noise or poor performance from your hard drive make sure you backup all you can before it dies.

Also do backups if you are like me and delete files by mistake. Regular backups have saved me a lot of effort and worry.

Everything is backed up, although am scuppered if the drive"does" fail as the PC has the disc in a partition in the HD.

Curiously the event log, indicates a cable is failing at the cdrom (event 11), everytime I hear the noise of the hard drive hunting for a file, or C: doesn't appear instantly. Can't be right?
I have also used chkdsk, that said the volume was dirty.

You mean that your hard drive has more than one partition on it, C:, D:, etc. This shouldn't be a problem if you have the data backed up. I'd be tempted to open your box up and give it a general clean plus make sure all cables/boards are inserted firmly.

As long as you have your original XP/XP2 installation CD it doesn't take long to re-install Windows on a new hard drive (45 minutes, say). You would then have to re-install any vendor supplied drivers and your own applications. If the worst comes to the worst you'd lose 3-4 hours of your life getting your machine up and running again.

Yes Drive C: has 3 partitions -
One is my data
the other 2 are FAT32 partitions, which I take is the Page File and the other original Software that Dell installed - I don't have a XP2 installation CD as one was never shipped - Dell have System Restore instead - does the same thing, I believe.

I'll give it a clean out and check the cables.

You want to make sure you have a copy of that recovery partition because you will probably need that if you re-install. I guess that contains the equivalent of XP plus any Dell drivers you need.

If I remember rightly if you press F12 when booting your Dell machine it will give you an option of booting from the recovery partition. It might be worth doing that to find out what options it gives you (perhaps it'll let you burn recovery CDs).

I think that is why it is a FAT32 partiotion, compared to NTFS partion, it rebuilds the NTFS whilst protecting the FAT32?

I don't know why your partitions are formatted with different file systems. If I had to guess I'd say it's because more software has the ability to read/write FAT32 than NTFS.