I’m having problems with my laptop suddenly switching off, and now when I restart, I am getting a, “your disk needs to be checked in 10.9.8. etc” error, and then ".TMP file is not valid"*, and “Mozilla blah, blah, blah needs to be truncated” lines, which all fly by before I get a chance to read them.
Anyone got any clues what all this is about?
Are these error messages stored somewhere on my pc?
Those are errors on the hard drive. Bad sectors or clusters. Windows is attempting to stave off failure by moving stuff around as best it can, but your hard drive is on life support. Backup up your stuff as quickly as possible, locate your Windows XP install disc, and go buy a new HD.
You might still be able to use the hard drive.
Back up everything, then reformat the drive. Probably a fair number of sectors will be marked as bad, and not used by the OS, so the available capacity will go down. But you may be able to use the reformatted drive for quite a while yet.
But it’s still good advice to get a new drive soon. Then you can use this one for your paging/swap files drive.