Windows 7: file record ... unreadable; weird partitioning

(sorry for the long-ish story)



A couple days ago, I decided to do some spring cleaning; wiped my drive and reloaded Windows 7 on the primary HDD. Everything seemed okay until earlier today -- I experienced a lot of lagging & slow responsiveness with only a few lightweight windows open (Chrome & 2 Windows Explorer windows). So, I rebooted and looked away at another machine.

A few minutes later, I noticed that the system did not boot. I saw multiple lines of "file record segment ### is unreadable" actively counting on my screen. Long-pressed the power button to shut down. Scheduled a boot-time checkdisk scan -- allowed it it to fix file system errors and recover bad sectors. The scan took about an hour to finish; the system restarted automatically before I could read the results.

I am in Windows right now. Seems to be working fine.

Should I assume my primary HDD is on the verge of failure? (Wouldn't be the first time I saw a stock HDD on a Toshiba fail after about 1 year of use!!!)

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Today was the first time I looked at my partitions in Disk Management. A little 11.35 GB partition is set to 'active' on the main HDD. (wtf - why? I dunno. Beats me.) Seeing the attached screenshot, is there any reason why I can't set the 452.95 GB partition as 'active?' I get a warning that says "Ensure that the partition you are about to make active includes valid system files. Otherwise the disk will not start. ...continue?"

After setting the larger partition as active, I'll probably delete the 11.35 GB partition.

Thank you.