Computer Hangs for no reason

Please people, I've got a MAJOR problem with my computer and there is no way I can figure out what it is.

I am using WindowsXP on a toshiba satellite labtop (2.4processor, and 256mb memory).

These are the symptoms: from time to time, my computer hangs and processes NOTHING, not even a single message.
While this happens, I hear it writting to the hard disk (the sound is similar to the one when defraging the drive).

This mostly occurs when I try to debug my game(but it is not caused by this), as soon as I press run to the Visual studio it starts doing it.
If I wait a while, for the computer to exit the hang, the visual studio displays this message:

"Internal Page Error"

I know it is not a windows problem, because yesterday I formated the drive and the same thing happened while formating. Even after format, of the whole disk it did it again today.

Could it be due to a damaged drive? A virus maybe? Has anyone heard of this before?

I am really thankful for your help, this thing is driving me nuts.