Alright. About, lets say, two weeks ago, I couldn't log in to my laptop. First attempt brought me to the laptops "default" profile, which itself was giving errors about a certain graphics engine failing to start. I shut the sytem down and turned it back on, figuring it was just a once off issue. After that, I would continuously get an error that the "logon service was not available". After researching around for a bit, I learned that the cause was most likely profile corruption. Thankfully my laptop had created a restore point three days before, so I restored to that point and thought no more of the issue, considering it just a freak chance.
However, today, I had a similar issue. This time around there were no graphics errors and a simple restart fixed it right away, but before I restarted I got a weird error, something about not being able to access the Toshiba HDD/SDD. Clicking the alert, I got a message box saying "dwRet=12", and then another error saying "Unable to get disk information, can not use the alert feature".
My laptop is a (close to) 5 year old Toshiba Satellite running Windows 7. I'm starting to get a little worried, how should I go about preventing this from happening again in the near future?