While browsing the net, my PC crashed. When I Re-Booted, scan disk started and froze at about 30% with a strange scratching sound coming from the Hard Drive so Re-Booted when the above happened again. Re-Booted again but this time I skipped the scan disk. Once into Windows I tried to Defrag when it froze on me again making the strange noise. Everything seems to be ok with the PC apart from when I try to delete a MP3 file which gives me the message “Cannot Delete File. File system error 1026” the file is showing a size of 40gb but I know for sure that it’s only about 50mb. Anyone any ideas on this???

The sound on your hard drive, indicate some hardware error, the file size, and not able to delete, may be due to the file allocation table may be corrupted due to the HD error, and only when the FAT are fixed, it will continue to report the wrong information.

But if your HDD is failing at the hardware level (ie. bad sectors), I would suggest after you ran SCANDISK (if possible), to move your data to a new drive, utilities like OnTrack and Norton Utilities can try repairing the damage, but these are only short term solutions.

HTH