paging error in windows2000

hi people. i have a li'll problem here. one of the computer here in the office is running windows2000. and it just happened today when my boss is encoding some (excel and word preferably) data on her computer when it just got error and been closed by the program itself. i found out too that the drive c on her compter has an error and access is denied. i dont have drive locking or what but it just been locked. it wasn't locked a while ago she said. the drive c cannnot be opened but the system is running. the system is in drive c. please reply as sooon as possible.

If you have a paging error in Win2k, you have a couple things that may be contributing. One, the hard drive may be full. Two, you may have hit a bad sector.

It might help to know what processor, memory and hard drive size is on the system. A full hard drive may be the result of a system with just enough memory to load the OS, and page out the applications (Word and Excel). If there isn't enough free space on the hard drive, the page file fills and you will get paging errors.

A new bad sector will also throw these errors.

can the files on that disk still be recovered..?? how...?

That depends on the problem. If you have a full hard drive, you might be able to get out of the situation slowly by saving currently open files out to a floppy, Zip, CD or other media. Then copy off material until you clear enough space to do more housecleaning.

If you have a bad sector issue, you might want to get something like SpinRite to recover the drive long enough to get the data off. SpinRite is inexpensive enough ($89 US at www.grc.com) that you can download and make a bootable CD quickly and get right to the problem. If the drive and data is salvagable, SpinRite will bring it up. Otherwise more forensics based tools may be required.