The last thing I saw was a BSOD...

Hey guys, I sure haven't been here for a while.

Anyway, basically what happened is I was launching Starcraft 2, and then I got bluescreened. It was extremely short, too. The blue screen probably was there for about one second, nonetheless not long enough for me to snatch any codes from it. After that, my computer started booting up as usual but after the abnormally long start up sequence (just the part with the Windows logo), the computer restarted again. I've tried using startup repair, but once that starts up, I just get a black screen with a cursor. I did also notice that the hard drive is only noticed after the computer has been off. For instance, if I try to boot up again and I just let it restart and then I try again, the hard drive won't be recognized or listed in the boot menu. I've tried using my installation disc, but that renders the same result as trying to use the start up repair. However, when the drive is unrecognized or unplugged, the installation disc loads up just fine. I'm currently using a dreadfully old Ubuntu CD live session to post.

Answers I'm looking for:

• Is my hard drive dead?

• Is there a way to fix this?

• Can I still recover my files?

Thanks in advance!

Good to see you again BetaMan!

If the drive doesn't show in the BIOS boot menu, then that's not a good sign.

Can you run some diagnostics on the HDD from within Ubuntu and see if it picks anything up? First, I'd back up whatever data you can get from it within Linux, just in case the worst happens.

You may be better off using some of the diagnostics from UBCD (or similar) - download links are at the bottom of this page:

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/download.html

The UBCD has drive specific tools which should yield much more information than a simple CHKDSK would.

Hey Ian!

From the Ubuntu terminal, I was able to get some error messages about how it couldn't get into the drive, so I decided to install Ubuntu on my media drive, however I noticed that the installer allowed me to pick out and allocate 127GB of unallocated space on the problem drive, so I went ahead and partitioned it and the OS installed without a hitch. To the so called "dead" drive. At this point, I'm able to view and change all of the files on the hard drive from Ubuntu. I downloaded Hiren's boot CD and I'm going to try to boot up and do some repairs using that. If I'm unable to make any progress with that I'll try out UBCD. I'll keep this thread updated.

Fingers crossed

Update!

So I transferred everything I cared about to an external hard drive, but not through Ubuntu. I tried to update it, which required a restart and once I turned the computer off, Ubuntu wouldn't boot or install again. I ended up using an undeleting program on my external drive, because I recently did a reinstall and used it for backup. Anyway, everything turned out fine and I booted into Hiren's mini Windows XP tool, which contains TONS of tools for everything. I'm using it right now to post and such. I also downloaded SpinRite.

The plan is to do a disk error scan, which is running right now, and take a before screenshot (all the blocks are red instead of green), then run SpinRite to repair sectors and whatnot, then do an after scan, screencap that, install Windows 7 again, and we should be good!