G'day John,
mate, this added information suggests to me that you may have a HDD on the way out. If you were one of my customers I'd advise allowing us to clone the drive and then run some diagnostics on it. Depending on the drive manufacturer and the diagnostic tools they supply you should be able to run non-destructive tests on the drive, but given that I reckon it's suspect I'd clone it first in case the tests finish it off. At the very least you should be able to interrogate the "SMART" database and see if the drive has actually overheated and you may be able to determine if the drive is running out of spare sectors to reallocate.

Drives aren't that expensive. I'd suggest a Seagate 340GB or there abouts (I'm running a 500GB in my HP) and clone the Toshi's drive onto it. We use a separate machine for our cloning efforts - especially for notebooks as it is less easy when you don't have the I/O for a second drive...

If you don't have these facilities available I'd expect your local, trusted computer shop should be able to help for a modest fee. It really only takes about 15 minutes of actual labour to do though the actual cloning process could take an hour or so, and they may do it for free if you buy the new drive from them.

--=-- My credo: If it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing - just ask my missus, she'll tell ya laugh --=--
You're only paranoid if you're wrong!