Alright. About, LETS say, two weeks ago, I couldn't log in to my laptop. First attempt brought me to the laptops "default" profile, which itself was giving errors about a certain graphics engine failing to start. I shut the sytem down and turned it back on, figuring it was just a once off issue. After that, I WOULD continuously get an error that the "logon service was not available". After researching around for a bit, I learned that the cause was most likely profile corruption. Thankfully my laptop had created a restore point three days before, so I restored to that point and thought no more of the issue, considering it just a freak chance.

However, today, I had a similar issue. This time around there were no graphics errors and a simple restart fixed it right away, but before I RESTARTED I got a weird error, something about not being able to access the Toshiba HDD/SDD. Clicking the alert, I got a message box saying "dwRet=12", and then another error saying "Unable to get disk information, can not use the alert feature".

My laptop is a (close to) 5 YEAR old Toshiba Satellite running Windows 7. I'm starting to get a little worried, how should I go about preventing this from happening again in the near future?You want to go to the website of your HD manufacturer, download their diagnostic UTILITY, burn it to cd and run it.