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Windows failure to start, Repair fails, cmd can only see X drive
Hi all! Looking to find out if my drive is mostly dead or all dead.
-Computer rebooted suddenly on its own (not during an update or install of a program). Has rebooted in the past due to minor bumps to the tower, but boot went normally those times. This time I wasn't even in the room, so no bump, no activity. If any error message showed up I missed it.
-At reboot drive was unrecognized, message on screen said to 'insert media' to boot.
-Restart after that lets drive be initially recognized - can see in BIOS, when exit BIOS goes to "windows failed to start" screen. No error code/reason is shown on this screen. Options are to start normally or do startup repair.
-If I start normally, goes to begin startup, get a very quick BSOD (can't read any of it), and it automatically reboots. In this cycle the drive remains recognized, same process as above.
-If I go to startup repair, somewhere in its looking around, something goes wrong. The red light on the back of the drive comes on which I gather is bad news for this drive. Startup repair reports it can't fix the prob. The log says it is a registry problem. After the failure I get the option to open a dos window. Here I can see that I am in the X drive, which I guess is a minimal repair OS hidden on my hard drive? So loading that much obviously had worked earlier. However, at this point dispart list disk yields nothing at all, and diskpart list volume shows only my dvd ROM. My hard drive doesn't show up at all. If I attach my data slave drive for this whole shebang, that DOES show up and I can navigate around it, for what that's worth.
Anyway, I've seen a lot of info and it's starting to run together, but given that by the time I get to a command prompt my drive has (apparently) stopped talking entirely, is there any way to decide what is wrong and actually fix it?? I've seen registry copy solutions, and some master boot record instructions, but I wanted to post my specifics because those require the drive to keep communicating right?
Since it does get recognized and talk to the comp at first I can't let go of the idea that mayyybe there's a way to find out what got corrupted and fix it!
Explanations/advice welcome. Thanks for any info!