Windows not booting. Running chkdsk from DVD taking days.

Hi, I'm currently having problems getting Windows started on a laptop. Booting up gets to the point where it says "Windows loading files" before it bails with an error 0xc00000e9. I tried using startup repair from a Windows DVD but that seemed to just get stuck so I've now jumped into a cmd and run chkdsk /r. This has been running approx. 24 hours and is only on "20701 of 240120 files processed" and saying it's at 0%. I'd estimate it's told me there's about 200 "file record segments" which are unreadable so far.

Now to bashfully explain how it got like this... the whole computer was acting very slowly, mouse jerking across the screen and programs taking 10s of minutes to close, this happened just after plugging in a mouse and it eventually automatically found the driver (probably a weird coincidence but thought it was worth mentioning). So my first instinct was to shutdown and turn it on again -- old cliche but it usually works -- after an hour it was still stuck with the spinning circle and "logging off". I figured if it hadn't closed managed to shut the important processes down by then, it never would so I did a hard shutdown which I assume was the worst choice I could've made.

So... what am I able to do to fix this? Is it worth letting chkdsk finish, even if it's looking to take over a week? The laptop is only a couple of years old so I wasn't expecting anything like this to happen yet. It's an Acer Aspire 5742Z. Oh, and the harddrive is 250GB (I think, going from memory) so I'm assuming the scan shouldn't take this long.

Also, for future reference, if I'm ever stuck behind the spinning wheel with it not looking like it's doing anything, how long is reasonable to wait and what would be more appropriate action?

In my experience, whenever CHKDSK slows to a crawl (like you're experiencing) that often means it's encountering bad sectors -- in which case, it will try to read the same sector over and over and over ... eventually timing out and going on to the next. This is a strong indication that the drive is failing.

Even if you let CHKDSK finish, if the drive is failing, the next time you run it -- it's only going to take longer to finish, and soon down the road, the drive will fail completely.

You should look into replacing the drive.

would you happen to know any methods I could try to get at them?

I have had very good experience running RecoverMyFiles from runtime software. Since it doesn't bother with the partition table, and is able to find files and directories on its own, it's able to recover data when you can't get into them with file management apps. You can download and try it for free -- but you need to be able to recover the files to a different disk than the original. IF the search finds the files and they look OK, you have to go online and purchase a license to actually recover the files.