[Q] Problems

Lately I've been having some odd behavior with my system (in my sig), I recently got the motherboard and RAM which seems to be fine, but as of the past few days Windows 7 seems to run sluggish and takes forever on bootup once the desktop screen appears (Fraps takes forever to load into tray) and a couple times when booting Windows it did the checkdisk a few times. And when in Linux my network dies occasionally and returns on its own and when I'm copying large amounts of files it renders the entire system completely unusable, I'm not sure what best ways to diagnose what's going on, right now I'm running smartctl in Linux on the main drive which takes 4 hours and will do the second drive after. I ran Windows 8 RP on the SSD just yesterday and it's blazingly fast with no delay on anything.

When playing my games I don't see any performance loss with the odd Windows behavior, Windows is on my first HDD while my games are on my second HDD so I'm thinking it's the first HDD failing.

So any other ways to diagnose if it's actually my HDD or is it my new motherboard or worse yet, ram (which is unlikely)?

For the HDD, I've found SeaTools for DOS to be a pretty good diagnostic tests for HDDs. Most features work on non-Seagate drives as well.

WD has their own program if you prefer to use that, you can submit the results of that test if you happen to RMA the drive.

Thanks I ran the WDC diagnostics while I went out to watch Skyfall, it was finished when I got back, says it found sectors that may be repaired so I'm copying my user files to my other drive right now. I think this drive has had it, may as well reinstall Windows to the other drive or upgrade to Windows 8 on the other drive until I get a new drive.

I also shrank the partition via Windows disk management so I can make room for a partition in Linux, I wonder if that has anything to do with it.

EDIT- attempting to repair sectors failed... haha gonna try installing to my SSD and shrink it down.