Jazzmosis

I've got a 500 GB XHDD, one that was working like a charm until one fateful day that I had a series of files that was at FAT32's maximum size allowance. I attempted to delete the files, but in the process one failed to delete, corrupted some data, and gave me a problem in my recycle bin that even though there was nothing in it, every time I attempted to empty it I would get the message: "Cannot delete DG(number, usually between 1 and 19): the directory is not empty."

I never had any directory like that. I ran chkdsk on the XHDD, it found the data and allowed me to resolve that issue, but ever since then I've been having intermittent failures of the drive while it's in use. It boots up just fine, I can access files just fine, but it seems that if I stop accessing files on it for more than 5 minutes it stops reading. If I try and get files after a 'downtime', I receive a message that says "The I/O device timed out before it could perform specified operation" and I get Cancel, Abort, or Retry buttons. It doesn't matter which I press, nothing happens. The only way to restore functionality is to turn the XHDD off and back on, but I still get the same problem if I stop accessing files.

It writes files to the disk from my HDD without issue, I can copy/paste files fine, move files, and run installs off the XHDD. If I'm playing music off a playlist with all the files on the XHDD, it works fine.

I have Windows XP, which I recently formatted (irrelevant). I'm beginning to think that I'll have to format the XHDD in order to restore full functionality, but frankly, that's something I'd like to avoid (since I've got nowhere to put all the data on it).

This one has me quite stumped. Does anyone have any advice?