Quote Originally Posted by dpatchen
I think it's time for Geek Squad
When I said "professional", I don't think they were on my mind.

Harry's link might not have worked, so here is the gist of it: http://www.knoppix.net/wiki/User:Harry_Kuhman Then to http://www.knoppix.net/wiki/Rescue_FAQ There are other things you can try, but it appears that your drive suffered a major brainfart (technical jargon for HOSED). Your data may not be recoverable by any easy methods and it is rather expensive to have it done by a data recovery service. I would not be using the drive as a main drive in the laptop again, since it appears to have issues. It should be replaced and everything installed on the new drive instead. That is my opinion. You could run diagniostic programs on it and verify it's function, but 9 times out of 10, they will just fail again. Laptop drives take a beating and are prone to failures. I would keep searching and doing a little reasearch in the community pages on the microsoft site and see if you can find any similar issues with a resolution. Sometimes you get lucky and sometimes you don't. I would try to recover whatever data I could and then be certain to do frequent backups in the future. If your IT department has a spare drive, you might have them install it and see if you can keep the old one in order to try the data recovery. They also might have some tools that they could use to help you out. It is a wise person that makes friends with the resident computer gurus. I have been lucky sometimes by trying some disk imaging software. Ghost might work sometimes, but Acronis True Image surprised me several times by recovering some drives that Ghost choked on. Got most of the data, but sometimes not all, or it may be slightly corrupted. Best I've done is about 95% by that method. There may be alternative tools in Linux that could do the same, but since I have the others, I have no real need to experiment until a serious issue arises.