Toshiba laptop M55.. XP SP3.. Norton Security 2006.. everything up-to-date AFAIK..
got a couple of random "write failure c:\$mft" a few days ago.. this morning, got a "yukon marvel pre-boot failure".. it was looping on that error.. turn off, reboot, everything slow but running..
about an hour later, machine re-boots.. GoBack says it did the re-boot, and that there's a hardware problem.. GoBack makes me uninstall GoBack.. tells me to run Scandisk, then re-install GoBack..
so I backed up all the important stuff to a removable drive.. along the way, got a couple of other random "write failure" errors to strange file names in Windows folders, and a couple of lock-ups.. each re-boot worked, and I eventually got all the backups done..
I've searched high and low, and have no idea what to do next.. I found stuff that indicates the Yukon error might be network card related, but I don't use the network card.. and the rest of this sure doesn't sound like network card.. what diagnostic should I run? is the hard drive getting ready to fail?
Steve Green