I have a 300GB SATA hard drive that I have about 150 GB worth of data on. It is not my primary drive, I am running xp pro on a SATA 75GB raptor. Today while trying to access some files on the 300gb drive a folder suddenly showed empty. It didn't make any sense and quickly thereafter my computer froze up. I rebooted and now my computer takes about 10 minutes to load windows and log in (it used to do it in about 20 secs.) now I cannot access the 300gb drive at all and when I try my comp freezes. I have run full virus scans and adware scans and nothing has shown. Please help I cannot afford to loose the data I have on that 300GB drive!!

Slave the HD on another PC to see if you can directory it. If yes then copy the data to the Master.

Edit: it kind of sounds like you may have had a registry corruption.

Yeah I guess that was my first idea but my problem is that I don't have another HD that is anywhere close to being large enough to copy 150 GB worth of data to. I am in the process of reformatting and reinstalling XP on my main drive in the hopes that a fresh registry and 100% clean OS will fix the problem. I am just praying that the my 300GB HD isn't corrupted beyond recovery. Note I tried running chkdsk and all it did was say that the disk was unreadable and that there was not enough space to "hotfix any sectors"..