My C Drive will not boot.

Factual Questions
1

A mod is probably going to get on to me for this, but It won’t change the fact that my Computer has crashed.

turned on my laptop today, Vista starts to load. A blue screen flashes for a second, and I am asked how I want to continue.

An X drive (Didn’t even know I had an X drive) kicks in, and repair options are then given.

I do not have a back up of my files.

A system restore point can not be found, and VISTA wont even recognize that I even have a C Drive.

I (thankfully) also dual boot Ubuntu on my D Drive.

Through Ubuntu I can verify that my files are still there.

A look at my Autoexec has a Muvee~1 path in it.

I was running Vista just fine. Turned off my computer, and now nothing.

Nothing added, nothing changed. However, my CPU was processing A LOT of something. The cycle light was going like crazy.

Not that I could know what to do with a simply blinking light.
any help here would be nice.

2

Could be a bad drive. Boot from your vista disc and go to the recovery console and do a chkdsk.

3

I have been working it on my end.

The latest I have is :

Cyclic Redundancy Check

When I tried to switch from X: to D: [No problems] and then It happens from D: to C:

Seems to me to be lethal. :mad:

4

If your hard disk might have died, do NOT do a chkdsk. Do not do anything to that disk except get your files off with a recovery program.

After that, you can try chkdsk. Also Vista has a nice feature after you boot off the DVD to repair the partition’s boot information.

Uhh… there is no CPU light. That’s the hard disk light. It goes off when something is accessing the disk.

5

This D drive: is it a separate physical drive, or a second partition on your single HDD? If the latter, odds are that since Ubuntu works just fine, there’s nothing wrong with your HDD.

If you boot off your Vista DVD, you should be able to do a System Restore. Before that, as Vista tries to start, press F8 right at the start and you’ll get a menu. Select ‘Last Known Good’.

6

Good News: I found recovery media

Bad News: For my older two laptops.

7

“Recovery Media” generally only formats your hard drive and reinstall the OS. Since in the OP you seem to care about your files, I’d do as Alex_Dubinsky suggests and use your linux partition to back your files up now.

It’s certainly possible that a CRC error is just a temporary glitch that chkdisk can fix, but if it’s a HD problem, any messing around you do lessens the chances of getting working data off.

Once that’s done, you can do as Quartz says. If that doesn’t work, a Repair Install might.

8

I know this sounds like magical thinking, but do what I wish I had done before I went to all the trouble of restoring my hard drive from backup a few weeks ago: double-check your connections. I know it’s a pain in a laptop, but just open it up and disconnect the hard drive and re-connect it, then try again. It really might be worth it.

9

This is the great Startup Repair feature i mentioned:

10

If the drive is dead and you cant get your files off, you can try something like spinrite. You’ll need to pull the drive and install it on a computer running windows first.

11

I was able to download Ubuntu 8.10

Using that, I was actually able to mount my C: drive

I got off my Tax Forms, Receipts, and a few incomplete projects.

It’s amazing to think what all I have that’s not necessary.

I would like to get my Itunes library, obviously, but I doubt that is gonna move. Anything else I can think of would be of a like size.

The Linux Distro is running from the CD drive, making no changes to my computer.

If I don’t mount C: will it stay the same, or will it get worse?

12

I Noticed that the used space on my C: is 49 gigs.

My Old Ipod has 55 Gigs free. I no longer use it, and thankfully, the disk space option is available.

Transfering the entire volume will take over 24 hours (I just tried, it said 27 hours.)

Also, the transfer process hit upon damaged files, so that the transfer stopped. -It waits for user confirmation of error, before it will continue.

I can back up my entire drive, but that is not reasonable to do.

What folders compose the bare minimum I need to back up?

I’m Guessing Windows, Temp, Autoexec, what else?

13

At this stage, I wouldn’t bother backing up anything but your data. If you put your data where Windows wants you too (My Documents), that should be C:\Documents and Settings\username.

14

>I’m Guessing Windows, Temp, Autoexec, what else?

Err, you shouldnt be overwriting those folders or files on your new install, especially if you were having problems earlier. Just get your media files and documents. If you use IE get your favorites and if you use firefox get its profile.