Hard Drive Self Immolation?

Until last night, my 40 Gig 7200 HDD has been running fine for the 1.5 - 2
years I've owned it. Then I noticed that it was down to 15% free space.
Asked my wife if she installed any large programs; nope. So I uninstalled
some fairly large game demos, and then I was down to 7 PERCENT. I scanned
with an updated Norton Antivirus 2003 and Systemworks, as well as at
PCPITSTOP.com, which gave me no suggestions other than to defrag and update
my HDD!

So, I'm wondering if there's a physical problem with the drive. I'm now
down to 185 Megs of space on my Win XP Home Athlon XP+ 1800 system with 768
RAM. If there's a Write head on the drive, is there also an Erase head that
may be defective?

Anyone got any suggestions, other than Ghost to a larger HDD? Is this one
shot? Any help greatly appreciated.


TIA,


Jim

Hello:
In addition to Ralph's suggestion, it may be possible one of those demo
programs was spyware which can download and install things without your
knowledge.
AdAware from Lavasoft is good for rooting out spyware.
--
regards,
bruce

The PC Guy
Bruce Von Deylen
Pierceton, Ind. USA
Serving the computer impaired in northern
Indiana and southwest lower Michigan

E-mail: brucevdatmichianadotorg
"Ralph Mowery" wrote in message
news

"Sarah Until last night, my 40 Gig 7200 HDD has been running fine for
the
1.5 - 2
years I've owned it. Then I noticed that it was down to 15% free space.
Asked my wife if she installed any large programs; nope. So I
uninstalled
some fairly large game demos, and then I was down to 7 PERCENT. I
scanned


Did you defrag the drive ? Before doing that empty out the Recycle Bin
also.
Not that it will need it , but have you checked to see if there are any
virus on the drive and also if there are a bunch of .tmp files or files
that
start with a ~ character or something similar that need to be deleted.