[aurimasmb]

I have a one year-old Vista, and until yesterday, have had no problems with it.

I started a program (Azureus Vuze) and it prompted me that it had not been shut down properly, a message I had received before. However, it also returned a strange error about a corrupt and unusable disk.
Within seconds all active programs on my desktop began spitting the same error message at me:

"The file system structure on the disk is corrupt and unusable. Please run the Chkdsk utility on the volume C:. "

C: is the partition where Vista is installed, so this is worrying to me.

I was worried that if I tried to reboot, Windows would not be able to load, because of the corrupt disk. So I tried, on a hunch, uninstalling Azureus Vuze, and either by coincidence, or because the corruption was somewhere in the Vuze program files the problem went away.

I rebooted some time later, and when prompted with the recommended option to run Chkdsk, I declined temporarily, thinking to run it next time I booted.

Everything worked fine once more, until again, completely randomly, the error reappeared. Just as before, it strangely disappeared for no reason either...

Before I reboot and run Chkdsk, which I am scared to do, for fear of losing my HD if windows won't load, can anyone give me some advice on this?

Could this be a virus? Is this hardware, or software?

[Hybr!d]

Aside from Azureus being used to steal, it also kills hard drives as the program constantly reads/writes to your hard drive for hours/days/weeks on end.

Running checkdisk will attempt to fix the file system, the only reason that you would lose everything is if the hard drive is faulty and on it's way out, which then it will die within a few weeks anyway.

If in doubt back up.