Hard Drive Drama!

KidChocobo · 19 Aug 2012

A kay, I have a Dell Inspiron 1545 with Vista Home Premium as the default OS. I've had this laptop for the past three years now and I recently upgraded to 7 Ultimate x64 in February.

Last Tuesday my computer notified me of important updates. I updated and as I was doing so my laptop froze and I had to hard reset it. Now, I try to boot it and it goes into Startup Repair. It scans for issues and says its nothing that Windows can repair automatically.

I tried using chkdsk from WinRe and it reports that my files are unreadable and doesn't even finish the task.

I can't get it into SafeMode to try and create a System Image.

I can't even get it to boot at all.

A week and a half ago I remember the computer getting the blue screen of death a few times when I either had many applications open or I tried to open iTunes.

Is my hard drive dead?

My laptop is three years old after all.

What do I do?!?

Please help!

Ztruker · 19 Aug 2012

What do you mean when you say WinRE. Have you tried booting a windows 7 install DVD, taking the Repair path to get to a Command Prompt then running chkdsk from there?

Do you have backups? Sounds like you don't which is unfortunate.
If you have data you don't want to lose you could install a new hard drive and reinstall Windows 7.
You could then attach the old hard drive via a universal USB IDE/SATA (or similar) and see if you can rescue the data with one of the free programs like Recuva.