.INK please help

[Elvis Ma]

hey guys,
i was working on my laptop then it suddenly crashed so i tried ctrl alt del but it didn't work so I turned it off manually. I turned it back on and waited for the disk scan to complete then logged back into windows only to find that nearly every file or program that had an extension got renamed to .ink. during the disk scan i noticed that windows had "truncated" some sectors or something..maybe this had something to do with it. anyways, i reformatted my laptop cause I didnt know what to do and I didnt have much on my laptop at the time so i figured i would save more time this way. Anyways do you guys have any clue what could have caused this and if theres anything i can do to prevent a re-occurrence or at least a way to fix it other then reformatting my HDD.

thanks for your help

Elvis

[Imaulle]

chkdsk /r

?

[HHunt]

chkdsk /r

?

And a run of memtest86+ (http://www.memtest.org), perhaps?
You want to burn the iso (http://www.memtest.org/download/1.65/memtest86+-1.65.iso.zip) and boot the resulting CD, letting it run for a while. Any errors = remove any removable memory, repeat. If it still fails, you'll need to send in the laptop to replace the memory in it. (if not, you have to replace the memory stick you removed.)

Checking your HD and memory for problems is a good place to start.

[Elvis Ma]

thanks for your help guys,
I havent run memtest yet, but i will soon when I get a chance to. It seems as though my desktop is on the fritz too, i just chkdsked and the scan deleted a "corrupt attribute record".
sigh...not looking good for me as i need a running computer to do my work :'(
Could bad ram be the culprit of my bad HD's?

[Imaulle]

bad ram could cause bad files yes... but wouldnt do any damage to the HD itself...

chkdsk /r will locate bad sectors and recover readable data so i suggest trying that after you find out if your ram is bad or not