..has once again packed up. i go to boot it up this morning, after shutting down fine yesterday, and when it boots, it says "A drive read error occurred. Press ctrl-alt-del to restart"

that is for my primary drive with xp on.

ive googled it and apparently it seems quite common but appears theres sod all i can do except format it (60gb of music ).

it also seems its an NTFS thing where the master boot record has corrupted or soemthing. i converted fat32 on my both my drives to NTFS about hmm over a month ago, because i had dvd images > 4gb which fat32 wouldnt read. dont understand why its monged up all of a sudden.

anyone any ideas? i really want my music back. should i stick the drive straight into my dads pc now and see if i can salvage some stuff, or should i try to repair xp install from xp disk? have also read if i can get into recovery console then chkdsk /r may help.

grrrrrr any help much appreciated, really cba with this.

edit: right, now im confused. i left it on with this error whilst i used my dads machine for about 20 mins. came back, restarted it, and now it works. i dont get it? but it seems it might need a full wipe. wish i had some money to set up a server with raid on.