Disk check on boot

Sorry if I'm posting this in the wrong place but I can't decide where to go.

I've been using 8RP for a couple of months with no problems. I'm dual booting with 8RP and XP. About a week ago when I tried to shut down I got a black screen with (movable) mouse pointer. Nothing happened and eventually I had to power off. Since then, when 8RP starts it does multiple disk checks (I have 4 disks and about 8 partitions), not finding any errors. I did a manual check of the disks and found errors on my XP boot disk (from 8RP) which were fixed. Then I stopped getting the disk checks for about a week. Now they're back. Again no errors are found (or reported as found) and manually checking finds nothing. When I boot to XP there is no sign of a problem.
Any ideas please?

most likely a physical fault or failure in the hard drive.

get yourself a copy of ubcd and run the disk utility for your drive, should tell you if you have any serious problems.