Sudden Slowdown in performance

[baasha]

i've been experiencing extreme slowdown in accessing data on my HDD (120 Gb SATA )
the screen freezes and takes forever to open the folder, and also ends up "Not Responding" many times....
earlier my D: was on FAT32, i changed it to NTFS, but the problem persists...
i'm running XP with SP2...i havent made any major h/w changes recently...only installed half life 2....i'm runnung Mcafee A/V ...there r no viruses on my system
i tried turning off the eye candy in XP, have a lot of paging file specified on a non-windows NTFS drive....problem persists

PC configs: PIV 1.5 Ghz, VIA mobo, 512 MB DDR Ram, FX 5200 (56.72 drivers)....

kindly help....

[ramank]

Please post your HijackThis Logfile for better assesment of your problem.

[baasha]

thks ram, but its a prob with my HDD
ran the seagate diagnostic tool...my HDD failed in the file structure test...i have been asked to return the drive