Hi there bcrew1375. I'm kinda new to these boards, so give me peace of mind lol. Anyways, hate to say it but im with sethmcdoogle and blacklord on this one. Especially sethmcdoogle. Trying to backup and save anything important to you on your drive is a MUST, and if its still under warranty, return it to the manufacturer.
I'm not too familiar with diskeeper, all I know of it is that I've seen it one time on a friends computer, and basically from what I seen its EXACTLY the same thing as windows defragmenter, but with the diskeeper logo. but then again, its through his business so its probably some lowlevel cheap version of diskeeper. Anyways, personally I don't think anything beats most of microsofts tools that come with xp. Anything else and basically your just getting the same thing but with a fancier name or labeling. Some may beg to differ on other utilitie programs, though.
Anyways I have come across basically your same problem but on my laptop hard drive. Toshiba and it wasnt even 6 months old at the time it messed up on me. I did the same research as you, my friend and found nothing short of an empty hand. Basically I figured mine was failing as well, but figured hopefully it was just certain sectors going bad on the disk, and I was looking for something ala windows 95 scandisk to do a surface scan and move bad sectors to a diff location on the drive. However, apparently there isn't any program for NTFS drives that does such a thing and if there is, then apparently it's a pain in the ass to find because I've tried numerous google searches lol.
As for disk defragmenter in general, if anyone can correct me wrong on this, then please do because I would love the vital information, but basically all your doing is moving files onto a different sector in the hard drive, allowing windows to sort of organize them better so it can find the files its looking for on your drive easier. I don't think disk defragmenter will do anything to better improve your sickly drive's health other than organize your drive.
In short, I had a laptop that basically failed on me as well. It took 4 days just for it to reformat, thats how bad it got. Imagine trying to fix the damn thing and having to reformat 5-6 times lol.
Your best bet would be to check if your still under warranty. I hope you can find an answer to your problem, as currently I'm trying to find my drive lol. Toshiba states they never recieved it so i think it got lost in the mail lmao.
Sorry for the long post. I do that. Hope this helps.