"philo" wrote

| Also a good idea to go the the website of the HD's mfg ...get and run
| their diagnostic. If /any/ errors are found, replace the drive
| Might as well run a RAM test too

I was able to test RAM. That checked out. I ended
up installing it into a Win7 box and running Hiren's
boot disk. The WD diagnostic came out with error 7
and quit. BootIt sees all the partitions, but the data
on them seems to be limited. Chckdsk retrieved all sorts
of things on the Windows partition but couldn't access
any of the others.
At this point I'm thinking there must be a problem
with the hard disk.